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INTRODUCTION 



THOMAS CARLYLE AND ROBERT BURNS 

" We have often wondered how he ever found out 
Burns," remarked Thoreau in commenting on the fact 
that Carlyle was not a critic of poetry, but that his 
sympathy was rather with men of endeavor, "and 
must still refer a good share of his delight in him to 
neighborhood and early association." 1 

There were common elements in their lives which 
helped to make Carlyle a sympathetic critic of Burns. 
Not only did both belong to the great clan of Scotch- 
men, but both came from the same part of Scotland, 
the same "neighborhood" — the Lowlands; Burns, 
from Ayrshire on the Firth of Clyde ; Carlyle, from 
Dumfriesshire, bounded on the south and east by Sol- 
way Firth and the English border. Burns was born 
(January 25, 1759) in a clay-built cottage, reared by 
his father's own hands, on a farm about two miles 

1 Thoreau, "Thomas Carlyle and His Works," A Yankee 
in Canada, p. 234. 



I : 



X INTRODUCTION 

from the town of Ayr. Carlyle was born (December 
4, 1795, two years after the death of Burns) in a house 
also built by his father, who was a carpenter and stone- 
mason by trade, in the small market town of Eccle- 
fechan, Annandale, consisting at that time of but a 
single street. Both came of sturdy Scotch peasant 
stock ; and both owed much to the rugged simplicity 
and unaffected piety — in the Roman sense of the word 
— of their early home influences. The Cotter's Sat- 
urday Night, which is counted amongst the finest 
expressions of Burns's poetic genius, and James Car- 
lyle in Carlyle's Reminiscences, which is different 
in form and substance, yet as unapproachable in 
its way, are in a sense tributes — high and lasting 
tributes, or, if you like the word, monuments — to 
these early home influences. Burns's and Carlyle's 
fathers were alike in many respects, though Carlyle's 
was far the sterner. What Carlyle says of Burns's 
father on pages 58 and 59 of this Essay on Burns 
could be applied almost word for word to his own 
father. In addition to the high and rare qualities of 
character dwelt upon in this passage, both possessed 
a native gift of speech ; in the case of Carlyle's father 
especially, of speech bold, free, and pithy. Said Mr. 
John Murdock, the teacher of Burns, in describing 
his father: "He spoke the English language with 
more propriety (both with respect to diction and pro-ij 



INTRODUCTION xi 

nunciation) than any man I ever knew with no 
greater advantages. This had a very good effect on 
the boys, who began to talk and reason like men 
much sooner than their neighbors." 1 

The following passage from Carlyle's tribute to his 
father is often quoted : — 

" In several respects, I consider my Father as one 
of the most interesting men I have known. He was 
a man of perhaps the very largest natural endowment 
of any it has been my lot to converse with : none of 
as will ever forget that bold glowing style of his, 
flowing free from the untutored soul; full of meta- 
phors (though he knew not what a metaphor was), 
with all manner of potent words (which he appropri- 
ated and applied with surprising accuracy, you often 
could not guess whence) ; brief, energetic ; and which 
I should say conveyed the most perfect picture, defi- 
nite, clear not in ambitious colors but in full white 
sunlight, of all the dialects I have ever listened to.. 
Nothing did I ever hear him undertake to render 
visible, which did not become almost ocularly so. 
Never shall we again hear such speech as that was : 
the whole district knew of it; and laughed joyfully 
over it, not knowing how otherwise to express the 

1 Currie, The Works of Robert Bums, fifth edition, Vol. I., 
p. 95. 



xil INTRODUCTION 

feeling it gave them. Emphatic T have heard him 
beyond all men. In anger he had no need of oaths: 
his words were like sharp arrows that smote into the 
very heart. The fault was that he exaggerated (which 
tendency I also inherit) ; yet only in description and 
for the sake chiefly of humorous effect : he was a man 
of rigid, even scrupulous veracity ; I have often heard 
him turn back, when he thought his strong words 
were misleading, and correct them into measurative 
accuracy." x 

As to their outward educational opportunities, how- 
ever, Burns and Carlyle had little in common. The 
school days of the former were practically over when 
he was ten years of age, whereas at the same age the 
latter was beginning his preparation for a university 
course. 

Robert Burns apparently made the most of the few 
opportunities for education that were thrown in his 
way. In the spring of 1765 his father and four of 
the neighbors clubbed together and engaged a } r oung 
man by the name of John Murdock to take charge 
of a little school, which happened to be situated 
only a few yards from the "mud edifice" of the 
Burns family. " My pupil, Robert Burns, was then 
between six and seven years of age ; his precep- 

1 Carlyle, Reminiscences, edited by Norton, i... p. 5. 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

ibout eighteen," wrote Mr. Murdock some years 

. " Robert, and his younger brother Gilbert, had 

grounded a little in English before they were 

under my care. They both made rapid progress 

iading, and a tolerable progress in writing. In 

ing, dividing words into syllables by rule, spell- 

g without book, parsing sentences, etc., Eobert and 

ert were generally at the upper end of the class, 

even when ranged with boys by far their seniors. The 

ots most commonly used in the school were, the 

Spelling Book, the New Testament, the Bible, Mason's 

< 'ction of Prose and Verse, and Fisher's English 

rcntmar. They committed to memory the hymns, 

cl other poems of that collection, with uncommon 

ri'ity. This facility was partly owing to the method 

pursued by their father and me in instructing them, 

•h was, to make them thoroughly acquainted with 

the meaning of every word in each sentence that was 

■ committed to memory. By the bye, this may be 

M- done, and at an earlier period, than is generally 

ght." l Burns's way of putting the same fact is 

acteristic, " Though it cost the schoolmaster some 

shings, I made an excellent English scholar ; and by 

e time I was ten or eleven years of age, I was a critic 



: Letter to Mr. Walker of Dublin, dated London. Feb. 22, 
Carrie (op. cit.), pp. 86-90. 



INTRODUCTION 



in substantives, verbs, and particles." 1 In 176(> his 
father moved to another farm, Mount Oliphant, which 
was so far from the s hool that the boys could nc 
longer attend regularly ; md on the departure of thei. 
teacher and friend some months later from that part 
of the country their attendance ceased altogether. 
" There being no school near us," wrote his brother 
Gilbert, "and our little services being useful on the 
farm, my father undertook to teach us arithmetic in 
the winter evenings, by candle-light ; and in this way 
my two eldest sisters got all the education they re- 
ceived." 2 At the age of thirteen he was sent with 
his brother Gilbert, "week about" during the summer 
quarter, to the parish school of Dalrymple, to improve 
his writing. His brother concludes the narrative of 
his schooling thus : " The summer after we had been 
at Dalrymple school, my father sent Kobert to Ayr, to 
revise his English grammar, with his former teacher 
[Murdock]. He had been there only one week, when 
he was obliged to return, to assist at the harvest. 
When the harvest was over, he went back to school, 
where he remained two weeks ; and this completes 
the account of his school education, excepting one 
summer quarter, some time afterwards [in his nine-- 

1 Autobiographical letter to Dr. Moore, Currie (np. a't), 
p. 37. 

- Currie {op. cit.), p. 61. 






INTRODUCTION XV 

teenth fear], that he attended the parish school of 

wald . . . to learn surveying." 1 During the 

weeks that he was with Murdock he made so 

good a stg t in French, that with the aid of a French 

rv and grammar, and the Aventures de Tele- 

)j Fenelon he acquired " in a little while," so 

write.-: lis brother, " such a knowledge of the language, 

read and understand any French author in 

prose." 

ithstanding the good use to which outward 

mities for education had been put whenever 

' resented themselves, so few and limited had 

jpey >een, although supplemented by considerable 

y, that Burns had to work out single-handed, 

) most part, the intellectual tools with which to 

his life and shape his art. His poverty was not 

it its rich compensations, but it remorselessly 

him access to the great intellectual storehouses 

lan experience at a time when his genius might 

ntered and claimed its owu. 2 Not so in the case 

lyle. 

yle, if not precocious, at least gave evidence 

when a child that there was something unusual in 

Before entering the village school he had learned 

1 Currie (op. cit), p. 66. 

2 Cf. pp. 8, 9, and 59 of the Essay on Burns. 



XVI INTR DUC TIO X 

to read from his mother, and under the h 
his father had taken his first steps in aril 
"I remember, perhaps in 1113^ fifth year, his tea* 
me Arithmetical things: especially how to ri 
(of my letters taught me by my mother, I h&\ 
recollection whatever: of reading scarcely any): he 
said, 'This is the divider (divisor) this' etc., and 
gave me a quite clear notion how to do. My m< 
said I would forget it all; to which he ans 
Not so much as they that never learned it. — 
years or so after, he said % to me once : ' r J 
do not grudge thy schooling, now when thy 
Frank owns thee to be a better Arithmetician than 
himself.' " l At the age of seven he was reported 
by the village schoolmaster as "complete in En 
and soon began the study of Latin under the ] 
and his son. In 1806 he was sent to the ac; 
or "Grammar School" at Annan, a small to 
Solway Firth about five miles south of Ecclefechan, 
to prepare for the University with a final outlook 
toward the ministry. Here, in spite of mecha 
teaching and barbarian associates, 2 he learned to read 

1 Reminiscences, i.. p. 45. 

2 For points of interest in regard to his life at the A 
Academy see Froucle. Thomas Carlyle, A History of tin 
Forty Years of his Life, Vol. I., chap. ii. ; lieminisc^itcc. 
p. 4(5 ; and Sartor Besartus, Book II., chapter on " Fee 



cztwe. \.. 



INTRODUCTION XVll 

Latin and French fluently, and made considerable prog- 
ress in algebra and geometry ; so that he was pre- 
pared to enter the University of Edinburgh at the age 
of thirteen — in the fall of 1809. 

His career at the University was not distinguished 
by brilliant scholarship. The only subject, as taught 
at the University, which aroused his enthusiasm was 
mathematics, in which he made marked progress, 
though winning no prizes; and, conversely, the pro- 
fessor of mathematics seems to have been the only 
member of the faculty who discerned in him any gift 
above the average. His acquaintances among the 
students were few ; but as for these few intimate 
acquaintances, " intellectually and morally, he had 
impressed them as absolutely unique among them all, 
— such a combination of strength of character, rugged 
independence of manner, prudence, great literary 
powers, high aspirations and ambition, habitual de- 
spondency, and a variety of other humors, ranging 
from the ferociously sarcastic to the wildly tender, 
that it was impossible to set limits to what he was 
likely to become in the world." 1 Perhaps the chief 
benefit derived from the University was the wide 
course of reading which he pursued independently 

1 Masson, " Carlyle's Edinburgh Life " in Edinburgh Sketches 
and Memories, p. 243. 



Xvm INTRODUCTION 

throughout the four years of residence there. 1 " Wha 
the Universities can mainly do for you, — what I hav< 
found the University did for me," said Carlyle man} 
years afterward (1866) in his inaugural address t< 
the students of the same University, "is, That r 
taught me to read, in various languages, in various 
sciences ; so that I could go into books which treated 
of these things, and gradually penetrate into any de- 
partment I wanted to make myself master of, as 1 
found it suit me." A passage from the chapter on 
"Pedagogy" in Sartor Resartus is at least mythically 
autobiographical on this point : " Nay from the chaos 
of that Library, I succeeded in fishing-up more books 
perhaps than had been known to the very keepers 
thereof. The foundation of a Literary Life was 
hereby laid. I learned, on my own strength, to read 
fluently in almc all cultivated languages, on almost 
all subjects and Sv eiices ; farther, as man is ever the 
prime object to man, already it was my favorite em- 
ployment to read character in speculatio and fiom 
the Writing to construe the Writer. A certain ground- 
plan of Human Nature and Life began to fashion itself 
in me ; wondrous enough, now when I look back on 

1 For lists of the books drawn by Carlyle from the University 
library during the first two years of residence, see Masson 
{op. cit.), p. 231. 



INTRODUCTION XIX 

; for my whole Universe, physical and spiritual, was 
\ yet a Machine ! However, such a conscious, recog- 
: ised groundplan, the truest I had, tvas beginning to 
be there, and by additional experiments might be cor- 
seted and indefinitely extended." 
Carlyle's practical career, if it may be so called, 
egan with schoolmastering. Soon after the comple- 
on of his college course, he was appointed mathemat- 
;il tutor in the Annan Academy, the school in which 
pie had formerly been a pupil. Two years later he 
•ave up the position to accept the mastership of a 
school at Kirkcaldy, a town in northeastern Scotland 
by the Fife sea-shore. Meanwhile he had kept up a 
Naif -hearted connection with the Divinity School at 
the University, out of regard for the long cherished 
hopes of his parents. As time went on, however, he 
pew farther and farther away alike from the idea of 
ntering the ministry and from the ^cation of teach- 
ing. "Finding I had objections [to entering the 
linistry], my father, with a magnanimity which I 
admired and admire, left me frankly to my own 
guidance in the matter, as did my mother, perhaps 
still more lovingly, though not so silently." And 
i) the connection with the Divinity School and all 
the connection implied was severed. Schoolmaster- 
lig, also, after four years of it, became intolerable. 
In the fall of 1818 he resigned his position at Kirk- 



XX INTRODUCTION 

caldy and went to Edinburgh with very indefmi' 
prospects. 

These years at Edinburgh were years of miserabl 
groping uncertainty, of bitter inward struggles. '. \ 
was a period " on which he said that he never looke 
back without a kind of horror." He began the stud 
of law, which "seemed glorious to him for its ind 
pendency ; " but presently gave it up in disgust as " 
shapeless mass of absurdity and chicane." Dyspeps: 
had begun to torment him — "a rat gnawing at tl 
pit of his stomach." He managed to eke out his sa 
ings by giving private lessons in mathematics ; ^ w< 
not that he had to face actual poverty or < 
hardships, but that he had not yet found the u^or 
that he could do with his whole strength. "Hof 
hardly dwelt in me . . .; only fierce resoh 
abundance to do my best and utmost in all 
ways and suffer as silently and stoically as m 
if it proved (as too likely !) that I could do n< 
This kind of humor, what I sometimes called 
1 desperate hope,' has largely attended me al 
life." 

It would be difficult to over-emphasize the signi' 
cance, not only for his own intellectual life, bul 
as it proved, for the intellectual life of England a] 
America, that at this crisis he began the study of t 
German language and literature. The years 181' 



INTRODUCTION xxi 

1821 were chiefly devoted to mastering the language 
reading deep and far into the literature. In 1820 
mid write to one friend, " I could tell you much 
b the new Heaven and new Earth which a slight 
y of German literature has revealed to me." A 
months later he wrote to another friend, "I have 
lived riotously with Schiller, Goethe, and the rest : 
they are the greatest men at present with me." 1 
le had found a task into which he could put, 
tor a time at least, his whole strength, — the intro- 
duction and interpretation to English thought and 
practice of the unifying and fructifying ideas of 
u Schiller, Goethe, and the rest." No man was more 
fit to do this than he of whom Goethe himself subse- 
ly said, " He knows our literature better than we 
L'selves." And no man than he felt more keenly 
lalism into which much of contemporary English 
lit and literature had fallen, — the dualism of 
materialism versus sentiment ; of things versus heart, 
— upon which the unifying and fructifying ideas 
Schiller, Goethe, and the rest," might exert an 
ideaHstic influence and do what Burns failed to 
( change the whole course of British literature." 2 
yle's new interest soon found expression. In 

1 Masson (op. cit.), p. 283. 

2 Cf. the Essay on Biwns, p. 59. 



xxil INTRODUCTION 

1822 his article on " Goethe's Faust " appeared ii 
New Edinburgh Review. In 1823 he began his 
of Schiller and his translation of Goethe's Wi 
Meister, which were published the year folio 
During these important years he was fortun i 
relieved from the necessity of doing hack work of 
any kind, and was able to devote the be£t part of his 
time to study and writing, through a private tutor 
to the sons of Mr. Charles Buller, which came to him" 
through the recommendations of his friend, Edward 
Irving. It yielded a salary of two hundred pounds. He 
found the boys congenial and interesting. His v 
ings and evenings were his own. Still, after two y 
the relationship became irksome ; and at his o\\ 
gestion was terminated. After a visit to London 
to Paris in 1824, made possible in part by the tutor- 
ship, he returned to Annandale; and early in 
settled with his brother on a farm called II 
Hill. Here his brother farmed while Carlyle 
nately toiled on his translations of German ro:m. 
and rode about on horseback. It was a sea: 
comparative peace, of growth, of renewed heall 
preparation for more important work. 

" With all its manifold petty troubles, this 
Hoddam Hill has a rustic beauty and dignity t< 
and lies now like a not ignoble russet-eoate I 
in my memory ; one of the quietest on the w 



INTRODUCTION xxiil 

and perhaps the most triumphantly important of my 
life. ... I found that I had conquered all my 
scepticisms, agonizing doubtings, fearful wrestlings 
with the foul and vile and soul-murdering Mud-gods 
of my Epoch ; . . . and was emerging, free in spirit, 
into the eternal blue of ether. ... I had, in effect, 
gained an immense victory. . . . Once more, thank 
Heaven for its highest gift. I felt then, and still 
feel, endlessly indebted to Goethe in the business ; 
he, in his fashion, I perceived, had travelled the 
steep rocky road before me, — the first of the 
moderns." * 

We are now approaching the time when Carlyle 
" found out Burns." October 27, 1826, he had married 
Jane Baillie Welsh. After eighteen months' residence 
at 21 Comely Bank, Edinburgh, during which time 
Carlyle formed an important friendship with Francis 
Jeffrey, editor of the Edinburgh Review, who accepted 
his articles on "Kichter" and "The State of German 
Literature " — the beginning of a long series of famous 
historical and critical essays, — they moved (May, 1828) 
to Craigenputtock, — the " Craig o' Putta," or Hill of the 
Hawks, — a lonely moorland farm, belonging to Mrs. 
Carlyle, more than a mile from the nearest house and 
fifteen miles from the nearest town. This was to be 

1 Reminiscences, ii., p. 179. 



XXIV INTRODUCTION 

their home for the next six years, broken only by ; 
seven months' visit to London (August, 1831-March 
1832) and a winter in Edinburgh (1833). Her. 
some of Carlyle's best work was to be done. O 
Craigenputtock itself and of Carlyle's reason for goim 
there the reader may best judge from the folio winj 
extract from a letter to Goethe : — 



Craigenputtock, Dumfries, 

25th September, 1828. 

You inquire with such affection touching our presen 
abode and employments, that I must say some word 
on that subject, while I have still space. Dumfries i 
a pretty town, of some 15,000 inhabitants ; the Con 
mercial and Judicial Metropolis of a considerable dii 
trict on the Scottish border. Our dwelling place i 
not in it, but fifteen miles (two hours' riding) to th 
northwest of it, among the Granite Mountains an 
black moors which stretch westward through Gall< 
way almost to the Irish Sea. This is, as it were, 
green oasis in that desert of heath and rock ; a piec 
of ploughed and partially sheltered and ornamente I 
ground, where corn ripens and trees yield umbrag 
though encircled on all hands by moorfowl and on] 
the hardiest breeds of sheep. Here, by dint of gre; 
endeavor we have pargetted and garnished for on 



INTRODUCTION XXV 

selves a clean substantial dwelling ; and settled down 
in defect of any Professional or other Official appoint- 
ment, to cultivate Literature, on our own resources, by 
way of occupation, and roses and garden shrubs, and 
if possible health and a peaceable temper of mind to 
forward it. The roses are indeed still mostly to 
plant; but they already blossom in Hope; and we 
have two swift horses, which, with the mountain air, 
are better than all physicians for sick nerves. That 
exercise, which I am very fond of, is almost my sole 
amusement; for this is one of the most solitary spots 
in Britain, being six miles from any individual of the 
formally visiting class. It might have suited Rousseau 
almost as well as his island of St. Pierre; indeed I 
find that most of my city friends impute to me a 
motive similar to his in coming hither, and predict 
no good from it. But I came hither purely for this 
one reason ; that I might not have to write for bread, 
might not be tempted to tell lies for money. This 
space of Earth is our own, and we can live in it and 
write and think as seems best to us, though Zoilus l 
himself should become king of letters. And as to its 
solitude, a mail-coach will any day transport us to 
Edinburgh, which is our British Weimar. Nay, even 

1 A Greek rhetorician of the fourth century, noted for his 
adverse criticisms of Homer. — Ed. 



xxvi INTROD UCTION 

at this time, I have a whole horse-load of French, 
German, American, English Reviews and Journals, 
were they of any worth, encumbering the tables of 
my little library. Moreover, from any of our heights 
I can discern a Hill, a day's journey to the eastward, 
where Agricola with his Romans has left a camp ; at 
the foot of which I was born, where my Father and 
Mother are still living to love me. Time, therefore, 
must be left to try : but if I sink into folly, myself 
and not my situation will be to blame. Nevertheless 
I have many doubts about my future literary activity ; 
on all which, how gladly would I take your counsel ! 
Surely, you will write to me again, and ere long ; that 
I may still feel myself united to you. Our best 
prayers for all good to you and yours are ever with 
you! Farewell! « T Carltle »i 

A few days before writing this letter — September 
16 — Carlyle, according to a note in his journal, had 
"finished a paper on Burns." The same letter con- 
tains the following paragraph, which, together with 
the passage quoted above, came to have the distinc- 
tion, some two years later, of being quoted and com- 
mented upon by Goethe in his "Dedication and 

1 Correspondence between Goethe and Carlyle, edited by- 
Norton, pp. 124-126. Cf. interesting letter to De Quincey, 
dated December 11, 1828, in Life of Carlyle by H. J. Nicholl. 



INTRODUCTION XXV11 

Introduction to the Translation of Carlyle's Life of 
Schiller." 1 "The only thing of any moment I have 
written since I came hither is an Essay on Bums, for 
the next number of the Edinburgh Review, which, I 
suppose, will be published in a few weeks. Perhaps 
you have never heard of this Burns, and yet he was 
a man of the most decisive genius ; but born in the 
rank of a peasant, and miserably wasted away by 
the complexities of his strange situation ; so that all 
he effected was comparatively a trifle, and he died 
before middle age. We English, especially we Scotch, 
love Burns more than any other Poet we have had for 
centuries. It has often struck me to remark that he 
was born a few months only before Schiller, in the 
year 1759, and that neither of these two men, of 
whom I reckon Burns perhaps naturally even the 
greater, ever heard the other's name ; but that they 
shone as stars in opposite hemispheres, the little Atmos- 
phere of the Earth intercepting their mutual light." 

Goethe's reply to Carlyle's letter contains these 
wise and appreciative words : — 

1 Appendix I. to the Correspondence between Goethe and Car- 
lyle. In the ''Dedication," etc. Goethe quotes also from the 
Essay on Bums a passage beginning, " Burns was born in an 
age," etc. (p. 9) to "a hundred years may pass on, before 
another is given us to waste" (p. 14), with the exception of a 
few sentences. 



XXVlll INTRODUCTION 

"With your countryman Burns, who, if he were 
still living would be your neighbor, I am. sufficiently 
acquainted to prize him. The mention of him in 
your letter leads me to take up his poems again, and 
especially to read once more the story of his life, 
which truly, like the history of many a fair genius, is 
extremely sad. 

" The poetic gift is, indeed, seldom united with the 
gift of managing life, and making good any adequate 
position. 

" In his poems I have recognized a free spirit, capa- 
ble of grasping the moment with vigor, and winning 
gladness from it." 

We are beginning to understand, at last, how not 
only "neighborhood and early association" but the 
very inequalities of their opportunities served to 
bring Carlyle and Burns closer together. There are 
few finer examples of the supremacy of character 
through and over culture than that afforded by Car- 
lyle, when, after his university training, such as it 
was, after his prodigious reading in history, poetry, 
and philosophy, unrivalled by that of any Englishman 
of his time, and covering the whole range of modern 
literature, — French, German, and English, — after hav- 
ing earned from Goethe, the greatest living authority 
in literature, the high commendation of being one 
who "rested on an original foundation" and who 



INTRODUCTION xxix 

"had the power to develop in himself the essentials 
of what is good and beautiful," he met Robert Burns, 
— literally on his own ground, — and looked into his 
face with the level, searching, yet sympathetic glance 
of a reader of men. 



THE WRITINGS OF CARLYLE 

Since the Essay on Burns not only lights the way 
to a deeper appreciation and enjoyment of the poems 
of Burns, but also may serve as a natural introduction 
to the subsequent writings of Carlyle, it remains to 
speak briefly of the latter. The outward events of 
Carlyle's life from now on were comparatively few 
and unimportant. In the spring of 1834 he left 
Craigenputtock for London, where he settled at No. 5 
Cheyne (pronounced Chainey) ' Row in the suburb of 
Chelsea, two miles west of the city on the north bank 
of the Thames. This was to be his home for nearly 
half a century, or until the day of his death, February 
5, 1881 ; here he resided continuously with the excep- 
tion of annual visits to his old home in Scotland, and 
a few short trips to Ireland, France, and Germany. In 
the work done here during the next thirty years is to 
be found his truest biography, the sincere reflection 



XXX INTRODUCTION 

of his life. Before leaving Craigenptittock, how- 
ever, he had written what is perhaps still the most 
famous of his works — Sartor Resartus — which was 
" mythically autobiographical." 

The following rough classification of Carlyle's most 
important writings may serve as a guide to further 
reading. They may be divided into four groups. To the 
first group belong the translations from the German 
(1823-1826). To the second belong the biographies and 
the biographical and critical essays, including the Life of 
Schiller (1824), Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches 
(1840-1845), Heroes and Hero Worship (1841), the Life 
of John Sterling (1850), and most of the Critical and 
Miscellaneous Essays, among which of special value 
are the essays on Burns (1828), Voltaire (1829), Goethe's 
Works (1832), BoswelVs Life of Johnson (1832), and 
Diderot (1833). In a third group might be placed the 
historical and ethical writings, — the essay on Signs 
of the Times (1829), Sartor Resartus (1831), the essay 
on Characteristics (1831), the French Revolution (1843- 
1847), the essay on Chartism (1839), Past and Present 
(1843), Latter Day Pamphlets (1850), and the History 
of Frederick the Great (1851-1865). Sartor Resartus, 
the essay on Characteristics, and Past and Present will 
be found to be the best introduction to Carlyle's 
political and ethical ideas. 



INTRODUCTION XXXI 



THE TEXT OF THE ESSAY ON BURNS 

The way in which the manuscript of the Essay on 
Burns was received by the editor of the Edinburgh 
Review is an illustration of the rather too well worn 
dictum that the contemporary critic is not always the 
best judge of a creation of genius. Jeffrey thought 
the article long and diffuse. Though he admitted that 
" it contained mnch beanty and fitness of diction," he 
insisted that it must be cut down to perhaps half 
its dimensions. Consequently when the proof-sheets 
finally reached the author himself, a good deal of 
the Essay Avas missing. Carlyle found "the first 
part cut all into shreds — the body of a quadruped 
with the head of a bird, a man shortened by cutting 
out his thighs and fixing the knee-caps on the 
hips." He refused to let it appear "in such a 
horrid shape." Replacing the most important pas- 
sages, he returned the sheets with an intimation that 
the article might be withheld altogether, but should 
not be mutilated. Fortunately for the readers of the 
Review, Jeffrey acquiesced and caused the article to 
be printed in very nearly its original form. 1 

1 The following passages do not appear in the form the arti- 
cle finally took in the Edinburgh Beview : pp. 28-31, "Of this 
last excellence, . . . I'll nae mair trouble them nor thee, O " ; 



xxxn INTRODUCTION 

In 1839 Carlyle's most important articles were col- 
lected and republished in four volumes, entitled Criti- 
cal and Miscellaneous Essays. Among these was the 
Essay on Burns. The revisions made by Carlyle 
in preparing the Essay for republication are of 
exceptional interest. They afford glimpses into his 
literary workshop, and permit us to see how he han- 
dled his tools, — not those, to be sure, which are used 
in blocking out and executing the main body of the 
work, but those of finer edge and temper which serve 
to bring out the more subtle shades of meaning or 
to point a keener emphasis. A list of some of the 
revised passages, printed side by side with the origi- 
nal versions, is given below. After the student has 
read the Essay, and has seen into its larger organic 
structure, and has learned to keep step with the 
swing and onward movement of the style, it will pay 
him to turn his attention back to some of these finer 
points of workmanship. Just why was this particular 
change made by Carlyle ? In just what way was this 
sentence improved as to its clearness, strength, cohe- 
rence, or eternal fitness ? In order to answer such 
questions as these, it will be found necessary in nearly 

pp. 38-39, " But has it not been said, . . . Baited with many a 
deadly curse ! "; and p. 45, "Apart from the universal sympathy 
with man . . . not without significance." 



INTRODUCTION 



xxxm 



every case to consider the passage with reference to 
its context, — sometimes with reference to the whole 
paragraph or section, — and thus, even in small things, 
the organic character of the style will be made manifest. 



ORIGINAL AND REVISED VERSIONS 



ORIGINAL VERSIONS IN 

THE EDINBURGH 

REVIEW 



REVISED VERSIONS 



Our own contributions to it, 
we are aware, can be but 
scanty and feeble ; but we 
offer them with good- will, and 
trust that they may meet with 
acceptance from those for 
whom they are intended (p. 
270). 



Our own contributions to it, 
we are aware, can be but scanty 
and feeble ; but we offer them 
with good-will, and trust that 
they may meet with acceptance 
from those they are intended 
for (p. 7). 



Conquerors are a race with 
whom the world could well 
dispense (p. 272). 



It is necessary, however, to 
mention, that it is to the Poetry 
of Burns that we now allude, 
etc. (p. 276). 



Conquerors are a class of 
men with whom, for the most 
part, the world could well dis- 
pense (p. 11). 

Here, however, let us say, it 
is to the Poetry of Burns that 
we now allude, etc. (p. 20). 



INTRODUCTION 



it is in some past, distant, 
conventional world, that poetry- 
resides for him, etc. (p. 277). 

The poet, we cannot but 
think, can never have far to 
seek for a subject, etc. (p. 277). 

Without eyes, indeed, the 
task might be hard (p. 278). 



We see in him the gentle- 
ness, the trembling pity of a 
woman, with the deep earnest- 
ness, the force and passionate 
ardor of a hero (p. 279). 



And observe with what a 
pmmpt and eager force he 
grasps his subject, be it what 
it may ! (p. 279.) 

Poetry, except in such cases 
as that of Keats, where the 
whole consists in extreme sen- 
sibility, and a certain vague 
pervading tunefulness of na- 



it is in some past, distant, 
conventional heroic world, thai 
poetry resides, etc. (p. 22). 

The poet, we imagine, can 
never have far to seek for a 
subject, etc. (p. 23). 

Without eyesight, indeed 
the task might be hard. Th 
blind or the purblind mai 
4 travels from Dan to Beer 
sheba, and finds it all barren 
(p. 25). 

We see that in this mat 
there was the gentleness, th 
trembling pity of a woman 
with the deep earnestness, th 
force and passionate ardor c 
a hero (p. 27). 

And observe with what 
fierce prompt force he grasp 
his subject, be it what it may '. 

(p. 28.) 

Poetry, except in such cases 
as that of Keats, where the 
whole consists in a weak-eyed 
maudlin sensibility, and a ce - 
tain vague random tunefulness 



INTRODUCTION 



XXXV 



tare, is no separate faculty, no 
organ which can be super- 
added to the rest, or disjoined 
from them ; but rather the 
result of their general har- 
mony and completion (p. 281). 

What Burns's force of under- 
standing may have been, we 
have less means of judging ; 
it had to dwell among the 
humblest objects ; never saw 
philosophy ; never rose, except 
for short intervals, into the 
region of great ideas. Never- 
theless, sufficient indication 
remains for us in his works, 
etc. (p. 282). 

Under a lighter and thinner 
disguise, etc. (p. 284). 

and thus the Tragedy of the 
adventure becomes a mere 
drunken phantasmagoria, 
painted on ale-vapors, and the 
Farce alone has any reality 
(p. 285). 

The Song has its rules 
equally with Tragedy (p. 286). 



of nature, is no separate fac- 
ulty, no organ which can be 
superadded to the rest, or dis- 
joined from them ; but rather 
the result of their general har- 
mony and completion (p. 33). 

What Burns' s force of under- 
standing may have been, we 
have less means of judging: 
it had to dwell among the 
humblest objects ; never saw 
Philosophy ; never rose, except 
by natural effort and for short 
intervals, into the region of 
great ideas. Nevertheless, suf- 
ficient indication, if no proof 
sufficient, remains for us in his 
works, etc. (p. 33). 

Under a lighter disguise, ste. 
(p. 41). 

and thus the Tragedy of the 
adventure becomes a mere 
drunken phantasmagoria, or 
many colored spectrum paint- 
ed on ale- vapors, and the Farce 
alone has any reality (p. 43). 

Yet the Song has its rules 
equally with Tragedy, etc. 
(p. 46). 



XXXVI 



INTRODUCTION 



In hut and hall, as the heart 
unfolds itself in the joy and 
woe of existence, etc. (p. 287). 



In hut and hall, -as the heart 
unfolds itself in many colored 
joy and woe of existence, etc. 
(P- 49). 



In his most toilsome journey- 
ings, this object never quits 
him, etc. (p. 289). 



In his toilsome journeyings, 
this object never quits him, 
etc. (p. 53). 



But to leave the mere liter- 
ary character of Burns, which 
has already detained us too 
long, we cannot but think that 
the Life he willed, and was 
fated to lead among his fellow 
men, is both more interesting 
and instructive than any of his 
written works (p. 290). 



But to leave the mere liter- 
ary character of Burns, which 
has already detained us too 
long. Far more interesting 
than any of Jiis wntte.n works, 
as it appears t u*, are his 
acted ones: the Life he willed 
and ivas fated to lead among 
his fellow-men (p. 54). 



Thus, like a young man, he 
cannot steady himself for any 
fixed or systematic pursuit, but 
swerves to and fro, between 
passionate hope, and remorse- 
ful disappointment, etc. (p. 
291). 



Thus, like a young man, he 
cannot gird himself up for any 
worthy well-calculated goal, 
but swerves to and fro, be- 
tween passionate hope and 
remorseful disappointment, 
etc. (p. 56). 



Manhood begins when we 
have in any way made truce 
with Necessity ; begins, at all 
events, even when we have 



Manhood begins when we 
have in any way made truce 
with Necessity ; begins even 
when we have surrendered to 



INTRODUCTION 



XXXVll 



surrendered to Necessity, as 
the most part only do, etc. 
(p. 293). 

Some of his admirers, indeed, 
are scandalized at his ever re- 
solving to gauge; and would 
have had him apparently lie 
still at the pool, till the spirit 
of Patronage should stir the 
waters, and then heal with 
one plunge all his worldly 
sorrows! We fear that such 
counsellors km J 7 '< little of 
Burns; and did »„^ consider 
that happiness might in all 
cases be cheaply had by waiting 
for the fulfilment of golden 
dreams, were it not that in the 
interim the dreamer must die 
of hunger (p. 298). 

And yet he sailed a sea, 
where without some such guide 
there was no right steering 
(p. 300). 

The influences of that age, 
his open, kind, susceptible na- 
ture, to say nothing of his 
highly untoward situation, 
made it more than usually clif- 



Necessity, as the most part 
only do, etc. (p. 61). 



Certain of his admirers have 
felt scandalized at his ever 
resolving to gauge ; and would 
have had him lie at the pool, 
till the spirit of Patronage 
stirred the waters, that so, with 
one friendly plunge, all his 
sorrows might be healed. Un- 
wise counsellors I Tliey know 
not the manner of this spirit ; 
and how, in the lap of most 
golden dreams, a man might 
have happiness, were it not 
that in the interim he must die 
of hunger ! (p. 73. ) 



And yet he sailed a sea, 
where without some such load- 
star there was no right steer- 
ing (p. 77). 

The influences of that age, 
his open, kind, susceptible. na- 
ture, to say nothing of his 
highly untoward situation, 
made it more than usually dif- 



XXXV111 



INTRODUCTION 



ficult for him to repel or resist ; 
the better spirit that was in 
him ever sternly demanded its 
rights, its supremacy : he spent 
his life in endeavoring to 
reconcile these two ; and lost 
it, as he must have lost it, with- 
out reconciling them here 
(p. 306). 

Granted, the ship comes into 
harbor with shrouds and 
tackle damaged ; and the 
pilot is therefore blameworthy ; 
for he has not been all-wise 
and all-powerful ; but to know 
how blameworthy, tell us first 
whether his voyage has been 
round the Globe, or only to 
Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs 
(p. 311). 



ficult for him to cast aside, or 
rightly subordinate ; the better 
spirit that was within him ever 
sternly demanded its rights, 
its supremacy : he spent his 
life in endeavoring to recon- 
cile these two ; and lost it, as 
he must lose it, without recon- 
ciling them (p. 90). 

Granted, the ship comes into 
harbor with shrouds and 
tackle damaged ; the pilot is 
blameworthy ; he has not been 
all- wise and all-powerful : but 
to know hoio blameworthy, tell 
us first whether his voyage has 
been round the Globe, or only 
to Ramsgate and the Isle of 
Dogs (p. 101). 



APPRECIATIONS 



It is admirable in Carlyle that, in his judgment of 
our German authors, he has especially in view the 
mental and moral core as that which is really influ- 
ential. Carlyle is a moral force of great importance! 
There is in him much for the future, and we cannot 



INTRODUCTION xxxix 

foresee what he will produce and effect. — Goethe : 
Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Scott. 
(July 25, 1827, — a year before the Essay on Burns 
was written.) Translated by John Oxenford. Lon- 
don, 1874. p. 276. , 

There is no philosophy here for philosophers, only 
as every man is said to have his philosophy. No 
system but such as is the man himself; and, indeed, 
he stands compactly enough ; no progress beyond the 
first assertion and challenge, as it were, with trumpet 
blast. One thing is certain, — that we had best be 
doing something in good earnest henceforth forever; 
that's an indispensable philosophy. The before im- 
possible precept, 'knoiv thyself,' he translates into the 
partially possible one, ' know what thou canst work at.' 
— Thokeau : Thomas Carlyle and His Works. A Yan- 
kee in Canada, p. 240. (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) 

I did not, however, deem myself a competent judge 
of Carlyle. I felt that he was a poet, and that I was 
not ; that he was a man of intuition, which I was not; 
and that as such, he not only saw many things long 
before me, which I could only when they were pointed 
out to me, hobble after and prove, but that it was 
highly probable he could see many things which were 
not visible to me even after they were pointed out. I 
knew that I could not see round him, and could never 
be certain that I saw over him ; and I never presumed 



xl INTRODUCTION 

to judge him with any definiteness, until he was inter- 
preted to me by one greatly the superior of us both — 
who was more of a poet than he, and more of a thinker 
than I — whose own mind and nature included his, and 
infinitely more. — John Stuart Mill: Autobiography. 

He did not believe in democracy, in popular sover- 
eignty, in the progress of the species, in the political 
equality of Jesus and Judas : in fact, he repudiated 
with mingled wrath and sorrow the whole American 
idea and theory of politics 5 yet who shall say that his 
central doctrine of the survival of the fittest, the 
nobility of labor, the exaltation of justice, valor, pity, 
the leadership of character, truth, nobility, wisdom, 
etc., is really and finally inconsistent with, or inimical 
to, that which is valuable and permanent and forma- 
tive in the modern movement ? I think it is the best 
medicine and regimen for it that could be suggested — 
the best stay and counterweight. For the making of 
good Democrats, there are no books like Carlyle's, and 
we in America need especially to cherish him, and to 
lay his lesson to heart. — John Burroughs : Fresh 
Fields, p. 281. (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) 

One of Mr. Carlyle's chief and just glories is, that 
for more than forty years he has clearly seen, and kept 
constantly and Conspicuously in his own sight and that 
of his readers, the profoundly important crisis in the 
midst of which we are living. The moral and social 



INTRODUCTION xli 

dissolution in progress about us, and the enormous 
peril of sailing blindfold and haphazard, without rud- 
der or compass or chart, have always been fully visible 
to him, and it is no fault of his if they have not be- 
come equally plain to his contemporaries. The policy 
of drifting has had no countenance from him. — Mor- 
ley : Garlyle. In Critical Miscellanies, London, 1871. 
(Chapman and Hall.) 

It is not the intellect alone, or the imagination alone, 
which can become sensible of the highest virtue in the 
writings of Mr. Carlyle. He is before all else a power 
with reference to conduct. He too cannot live without 
a divine presence. He finds it in the entire material 
universe, " the living garment of God." Teufelsdrockh 
among the Alps is first awakened from his stony sleep 
at the " Centre of Indifference " by the glory of the 
white mountains, the azure dome, the azure winds, 
the black tempest marching in anger through the dis- 
tance. He finds the divine presence in the spirit of 
man, and in the heroic leaders of our race. — Dowden : 
Studies in Literature, p. 74. London, 1878. (Kegan 
Paul, Trench & Co.) 

In Switzerland I live in the immediate presence of 
a mountain, noble alike in form and mass. A bucket 
or two of water, whipped into a cloud, can obscure, if 
not efface, that lordly peak. You would almost say 
that no peak could be there. But the cloud passes 



xlii INTRODUCTION 

away, and the mountain, in its solid grandeur, remains. 
Thus, when all temporary dust is laid, will stand 
out, erect and clear, the massive figure of Carlyle. — 
Tyndall : On Unveiling of the Statue to Thomas Car- 
lyle. New Fragments of Science, p. 397. (D. Appleton 
&Co.) 

Though not the safest of guides in politics or practi- 
cal philosophy, his value as an inspirer and awakener 
cannot be over-estimated. It is a power which belongs 
only to the highest order of minds, for it is none but 
a divine fire that can so kindle and irradiate. The 
debt due him from those who listened to the teach- 
ings of his prime for revealing to them what sublime 
reserves of power even the humblest may find in man- 
liness, sincerity, and self-reliance, can be paid with 
nothing short of reverential gratitude. As a purifier 
of the sources whence our intellectual inspiration is 
drawn, his influence has been second only to that of 
Wordsworth, if even to his. Indeed he has been in 
no fanciful sense the continuator of Wordsworth's 
moral teaching. — Lowell : Carlyle. Lite, ary Essays, 
Vol. II., p. 118. (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) 

Carlyle, therefore, must be judged as a poet, and 
not as a dealer in philosophic systems ; as a seer or a 
prophet, not as a theorist or a man of calculations. 
And, therefore, if I were attempting any criticism of 
his literary merits, I should dwell upon his surpassing 



INTRODUCTION xliii 

power in his peculiar province. Admitting that every 
line he wrote has the stamp of his idiosyncrasies, and 
consequently requires a certain congeniality of tem- 
perament in the reader, I should try to describe the 
strange spell which it exercises over the initiated. 
If you really hate the grotesque, the gloomy, the 
exaggerated, you are of course disqualified from en- 
joying Carlyle. You must take leave of what ordi- 
narily passes even for common-sense, of all academical 
canons of taste, and of any weak regard for symmetry or 
simplicity before you enter the charmed circle. But 
if you can get rid of your prejudices for the nonce, 
you will certainly be rewarded by seeing visions 
such as are evoked by no other magician. The 
common-sense reappears in the new shape of strange 
vivid flashes of humor and insight casting undisputed 
gleams of light into many dark places ; and dashing 
off graphic portraits with a single touch. And if you 
miss the serene atmosphere of calmer forms of art, it 
is something to feel at times, as no one but Carlyle can 
make you feel, that each instant is the "conflux of 
two eternities " ; that our little lives, in his favorite 
Shakespearian phrase, are "rounded with a sleep"; 
that history is like the short space lighted up by a 
flickering taper in the midst of infinite glooms and 
mysteries, and its greatest events brief scenes in a 
vast drama of conflicting forces, where the actors are 



xliv IXTROD UC TION 

passing in rapid succession — rising from and vanish- 
ing into the all-embracing darkness. — Leslie Stephen : 
Carlyle? & Ethics. Hours in a Library. 



PREFERENCES ON CARLYLE 

[Xote : The asterisk denotes those which are recommended to be 
read first.] 

Biography 

Froude, J. A. Thomas Carbjle. A History of the First Forty 
Years of his Life. 2 vols. London, 1882. Also, Thomas 
Carlyle. A History of his Life in London. 2 vols. Lon- 
don, 1885. (Froude was appointed by Carlyle to be his 
biographer and literary executor. ) 

*Garnett, Richard. Life of Thomas Carlyle. Great Writers 
Series. Bibliography by John P. Anderson. 

Macpher>ox, H. C. Thomas Carlyle. Famous Scots Series. 

Nichol, John. Thomas Carlyle. English Men of Letters 
Series. 

*Xicholl, H. J. TJwmas Carlyle. Edinburgh, 1881. 

Criticism and Personal fiemllections 

*Arxold, Matthew. Discourses in America. London, 1885. 
Emerson [and Carlyle]. pp. 138-207. (Should be read in 
connection with the Correspondence of Emerson and 
Carlyle.) Cf. Burroughs (op. cit.). 



INTRODUCTION xlv 

Bayne, Peter. Lessons from My Masters, Carbjlc, Tennyson, 
and Buskin. London, 1879. 

*Birrell, A. Obiter Dicta, First Series. London, 1884. pp. 
1-54. 

Blunt, Reginald. Hie Carlyles* Chelsea Home. London, 
1895. (Contains many interesting illustrations.) 

Bolton, Sarah K. Famous English Authors of th e Nineteenth 
Century. New York, 1890. Thomas Carlyle. 

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. On Carlyle. Poet Lore, 
Vol. X., pp. 012-018. (1898.) 

♦Burroughs, John. Fresh Fields. Boston, 1885. A Sunday 
in Cheyne Row. (Describes a meeting with Carlyle in 
1871.) In Carlyle's Country. Indoor Studies. Boston, 
1889. Arnold's Vieiv of Carlyle and Emerson. (Cf. Ar- 
nold (op. cit.). For the same articles, see Century, Vol. 26, 
pp. 530-543, and Vol. 27, pp. 925-932, and Atlantic Monthly, 
Vol. 51, pp. 320-330. All of the articles are illuminating.) 

Cairo, Edward. Essays on Literature and Philosophy. New 
York, 1892. The Genius of Carlyle. 

*Conwat, M. D. Thomas Carlyle. New York, 1881. (Rich 
in reminiscences of the personality of Carlyle. Contains 
an interesting autobiography of Carlyle, reported from a 
conversation). 

Dawson, G. Biographical Lectures. London, 1880. The 
Genius and Works of Thomas Carlyle. pp. 358-437. 

Dowden, Edward. Studies in Literature. London, 1878. 
The Transcendental Movement. (Develops the idea that 
what Coleridge was to the intellect of his time ; Words- 
worth, to the imagination and to the contemplative habit of 
mind ; Shelley, to the imagination and passions ; Carlyle 
was to the will.) 

Duefy, Charles G. Conversations with Carlyle. London, 1892, 



xlvi INTRODUCTION 

*Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Impressions of Carlyle. Scrib- 
ner's, May, 1881. English Traits. (Chapter I. contains an 
interesting account of his visit to Carlyle at Craigenput- 
tock. ) 

Espinasse, Francis. Literary Becollections and Sketches. 
New York, 1893. (A considerable portion of the book is 
devoted to an interesting account of " The Carlyles and a 
Segment of Their Circle.") For a characterization of 
Espinasse by Carlyle, see Duffy {op. cit.), p. 131. 

Gilchrist, H. H. Annie Gilchrist : Her Life and Writings. 
Edited by H. H. C. London, 1887. (Contains reminis- 
cences of Carlyle at Chelsea.) 

Harrison, Frederic Studies in Early Victorian Literature. 
London, 1895. Thomas Carlyle. Same essay in Forum, 
Vol. 17, pp. 537-550. (In this will be found a clearly stated 
adverse criticism of Carlyle.) 

*Higginson, T. W. The Laugh of Carlyle. Atlantic Monthly, 
Vol. 48, pp. 463-466. 

Howe, Julia Ward. A Meeting with Carlyle. Critic, Vol. I., 
p. 89. Reprinted in Reminiscences, 1819-1899. Boston, 
1899. 

Hunt, Leigh. Autobiography. 3 vols. New York, 1850. Vol. 
II., chap, xxiv., pp. 266-269. (Reminiscences concerning 
Carlyle's hatred of shams, habit of fault-finding, and para- 
mount humanity.) 

Hutton, Laurence. Literary Landmarks of London. Bos- 
ton, 1885. Thomas Carlyle. pp. 38-40. (Chiefly quota- 
tions from Froude's biography.) 

Hutton, R. H. Criticisms on Contemporary Thought and 
Thinkers. London, 1894. By the same author, Essays on 
Some of the Modern Guides to Thought in Matters of 
Faith. London, 1887. (Both works contain interesting 



INTROD UCTION xl vii 

though somewhat contradictory estimates of Carlyle's 
work.) 

k.Tames, Henry, Sr. The Literary Remains of the Late Henry 
James. Some personal recollections of Carlyle. pp. 421- 
468. Reprinted from Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 47, pp. 593- 
609. (An exceedingly interesting article.) 

Larkin, Henry. Carlyle and the Open Secret of His Life. 
London, 1886. (Asserts that Carlyle entertained hopes of 
being actively employed in public life, of leading great 
social and political reforms, — hopes that were thwarted by 
the death of Sir Robert Peel.) 

*Lord, John. Beacon Lights of History. New York, 1896. 
Thomas Carlyle. Criticisms and Biography. (Contains a 
brief review of Carlyle's principal writings.) 

*Lowell, J. R. Literary Essays, Vol. II. Carlyle. (1866.) 
See also Fable for Critics. 

Martineau, James. Essays Philosophical and Theological. 
2 vols. New York, 1879. Vol. I., pp. 329-405. (A 
philosophical discussion of the personal influences on our 
present theology of Newman, Coleridge, and Carlyle.) 

*Masson, David. Carlyle Personally and in His Writings. 
Two Edinburgh Lectures. London, 1885. (An important 
criticism of Froude's biography.) By the same author, 
Edinburgh Sketches and Memories. London, 1892. Car- 
lyle's Edinburgh Life. 

*Mazzini, Joseph. Essays. London, 1887. On the Genius 
and Tendency of the Writings of Thomas Carlyle. (First 
published in the British and Foreign Review, October, 1843. 
It still remains one of the best statements and criticisms of 
Carlyle's ethics.) 

Mead, Edwin D. The Philosophy of Carlyle. Boston, 1881. 

*Minto, William. A Manual of English Prose Literature. 



xlviii INTRODUCTION 

Edinburgh, 1886. Thomas Carlyle. pp. 131-180. (Con- 
tains a valuable analysis of Carlyle's style.) 

*Morley, John. Critical dliscellanies. London, 1871. Car- 
lyle. 

Oliphant, Mrs. M. W. MmmillarC s Magazine, Vol. 43, pp. 
482-496. (Personal recollections of Carlyle in his old age.) 

Parton, James (Ed.) Some Noted Princes, Authors, and States- 
men of Our Time. New York, 1885. Tea with Carlyle. 
Anon. Thomas Carlyle, by the editor. Carlyle : His 
Work and His AVife, by Louise Chandler Moulton. 
(Written in a popular, entertaining style.) 

Ruskin, John. Fors Clavigera. London, 1871-1884. (Passim.) 

*Saintsbury, George. Literary Work of Carlyle. Century, 
Vol. 22, pp. 92-106. 

*Scherer, Edmond. Essays on English Literature. Trans- 
lated by George Saintsbury. New York, 1891. Thomas 
Carlyle. 

Seeley, J. R. Lectures and Essays. London, 1870. (In the 
essay on Milton's Political Opinions, Milton as " the 
prophet of national health" is contrasted with Carlyle as 
" the prophet of national decay.") 

*Shairp, J. C. Aspects of Poetry . Boston, 1882. Prose Poets: 
Thomas Carlyle. (See also the essay on Cardinal Newman 
for a significant contrast between the style and thought of 
Carlyle and that of Newman.) 

*Stephen, Leslie. Hours in a Library. 3 vols. London, 
1892. Carlyle's Ethics. (Same essay in the Comhill 
Magazine, Vol. 44, pp. 664-683.) 

Thayer, W. R. Throne Makers. Boston, 1899. Carlyle. 
(First printed in the Forum, Vol. 20, pp. 465-479. A 
eulogy of Carlyle as a moralist and historian.) 

*Thoreau, H. D. A Yankee in Canada. Boston, 1878. 



INTRODUCTION xlix 

Thomas Carlyle and His Works. (Reprinted from Gra- 
ham's Magazine, March, 1847. One of the richest and 
most suggestive criticisms of Carlyle. ) 

*Tyndall, John. New Fragments. New York, 1892. Per- 
sonal Recollections of Thomas Carlyle. (Contains an 
interesting account of Carlyle's Edinburgh Address.) On 
Unveiling the Statue of Thomas Carlyle. 

Whitman, Walt. Complete Prose Works. Boston, 1898. 
Death of Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle from an American 
Point of View. 

Wilson, David. Mr. Fronde and Carlyle. New York, 1898. 
(Marshals the important criticisms of Froude's biography.) 

Wylie, W. H. Thomas Carlyle. The Man and His Books. 
London, 1881. 

Correspondence and Reminiscences 

Copeland, C. T. (Ed.) Letters of Thomas Carlyle to his 
Youngest Sister. Boston, 1899. 

Froude, J. A. (Ed.) Letters and Memorials of Jane Baillie 
Welsh Carlyle; Prepared for Publication by Thomas Car- 
lyle. New York, 1883. Reminiscences of my Irish Jour- 
ney in 1849. New York, 1882. 

Norton, C. E. (Ed.) Correspondence of Carlyle and Emerson, 
1834-1872. 2 vols. Boston, 1883. Supplementary 
Letters. Boston, 1886. Correspondence of Goethe and 
Carlyle. London, 1887. Reminiscences. 2 vols, in 1. 
London, 1887. 



BURNS 

[Edinburgh Eeview, No. XCVI. December, 1828] 

\ In the modern arrangements of society, it is no 
uncommon thing that a man of genius must, like 
Butler, ' ask for bread and receive a stone ' ; -for, in 
spite of our grand maxim of supply and demand, it 
is by no means the highest excellence that men are 5 
most forward to recognize. The inventor of a spin- 
ning-jenny is pretty sure of his reward in his own 
day ; but the writer of a true poem, like the apostle 
of a true religion, is nearly as sure of the contrary. 
We do not know whether it is not an aggravation of 10 
the injustice, that there is generally a posthumous 
retribution. Robert Burns, in the course of Nature, 
might yet have been living; but his short life was 
spent in toil and penury ; and he died, in the prime 
of his manhood, miserable and neglected : and yet 15 
already a brave mausoleum shines over his dust, and 
more than one splendid monument has been reared 
in other places to his fame ; the street where he lan- 

B 1 



2 BURNS 

guished in poverty is called by his name ; the highest 
personages in our literature have been proud to appear 
as his commentators and admirers; and here is the 
sixth narrative of his Life that has been given to the 
5 world ! 

% Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to apologize for 
this new attempt on such a subject: but his readers, 
we believe, will readily acquit him ; or, at worst, will 
censure only the performance of his task, not the 

io choice of it. The character of Burns, indeed, is a 
theme that cannot easily become either trite or ex- 
hausted ; and will probably gain rather than lose in 
its dimensions by the distance to which it is removed 
by Time. No man, it has been said, is a hero to his 

15 valet ; and this is probably true ; but the fault is at 
least as likely to be the valet's as the hero's. For it 
is certain that to the vulgar eye few things are wonder- 
ful that are not distant. It is difficult for men to 
believe that the man, the mere man whom they- see, 

20 nay, perhaps painfully feel, toiling at their side through 
the poor jostlings of existence, can be made of finer 
clay than themselves. Suppose that some dining ac- 
quaintance of Sir Thomas Lucy's, and neighbor of 
John a Combe's, had snatched an hour or two from 

25 the preservation of his game, and written us a Life of 



BURNS 3 

Shakespeare ! What dissertations should we not have 
had, — not on Hamlet and The Tempest, but on the 
wool-trade, and deer-stealing, and the libel and vagrant 
laws ; and how the Poacher became a Player ; and how 
Sir Thomas and Mr. John had Christian bowels, and 5 
did not push him to extremities ! In like manner, we 
believe, with respect to Burns, that till the companions 
of his pilgrimage, the Honorable Excise Commission- 
ers, and the Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt, and 
the Dumfries Aristocracy, and all the Squires and Earls, 10 
equally with the Ayr Writers, and the New and Old 
Light Clergy, whom he had to do with, shall have 
become invisible in the darkness of the Past, or visible 
only by light borrowed from his juxtaposition,/Tt will 
be difficult to measure him by any true standard or to 15 
estimate what he really was and did, in the eighteenth 
century, for his country and the world. It will be dif- 
ficult, we say ; but still a fair problem for literary his- 
torians ; and repeated attempts will give us repeated 
approximations. 20 

3 His former Biographers have done something^ no 
doubt, but by no means a great deal, to assist us. JjDr. 
Currie and Mr. Walker, the principal of these writers, 
have both, we think, mistaken one essentially impor- 
tant thing : ■ Their own and the world's true relation 25 



4 BURNS 

to their author, and the style in which it became such 
men to think and to speak of such a man./ Dr. Currie 
loved the poet truly; more perhaps than he avowed 
to his readers, or even to himself ; yet he everywhere 

5 introduces him with a certain patronizing, apologetic 
air ; as if the polite public might think it strange and 
half unwarrantable that he, a man of science, a scholar 
and gentleman, should do such honor to a rustic. In 
all this, however, we readily admit that his fault was 

10 not want of love, but weakness of faith ; and regret 
that the first and kindest of all our poet's biographers 
should not have seen farther, or believed more boldly 
what he saw. Mr. Walker offends more deeply in the 
same kind : and both err alike in presenting us with a 

15 detached catalogue of his several supposed attributes, 
virtues and vices, instead of a delineation of the result- 
ing character as a living unity. This, however, is not 
painting a portrait ; but gauging the length and breadth 
of the several features, and jotting down their dimen- 

20 sions in arithmetical ciphers. Nay, it is not so much 
as that : for we are yet to learn by what arts or instru- 
ments the mind could be so measured and gauged. 
4 1 Mr. Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided both 
these errors. He uniformly treats Burns as the high 

25 and remarkable man the public voice has now pro- 



BURNS 5 

nounced him to be: and in delineating him, he has 
avoided the method of separate generalities, and rather 
sought for characteristic incidents, habits, actions, 
sayings ; in a word, for aspects which exhibit the 
whole man, as he looked and lived among his fellows. 5 
The book accordingly, with all its deficiencies, gives 
more insight, we think, into the true character of 
Burns, than any prior biography : though, being written 
on the very popular and condensed scheme of an 
article for Constable's Miscellany, it has less depth 10 
than we could have wished and expected from a writer 
of such power; and contains rather more, and more 
multifarious quotations than belong of right to an orig- 
inal production. Indeed, Mr. Lockhart's own writing 
is generally so good, so clear, direct and nervous, that 15 
we seldom wish to see it making place for another 
man's. However, the spirit of the work is throughout 
candid, tolerant and anxiously conciliating; compli- 
ments and praises are liberally distributed, on all 
hands, to great and small ; and, as Mr. Morris Birk- 20 
beck° observes of the society in the backwoods of 
America, 'the courtesies of polite life are never lost 
sight of for a moment.' But there are better things 
than these in the volume ; and we can safely tes- 
tify, not only that it is easily and pleasantly read a 25 



6 BURNS 

first time, but may even be without difficulty read 
again. 

S Nevertheless, we are far from thinking that the 
problem of Burns's Biography has yet been adequately 
5 solved. We do not allude so much to deficiency of 
facts or documents, — though of these we are still 
every day receiving some fresh accession, — as to the 
limited and imperfect application of them to the great 
end of Biography. Our notions upon this subject may 

io perhaps appear extravagant; but if an individual is 
really of consequence enough to have his life and 
character recorded for public remembrance, we have 
always been of opinion that the public ought to be 
made acquainted with all the inward springs and rela- 

15 tions of his character. How did the world and man's 
life, from his particular position, represent themselves 
to his mind ? ' How__did coexisting ci rcumstan ces 
modify him from without; how did he modify these 
from within ? With what endeavors and what efficacy 

20 rule over them ; with what resistance and what suffer- 
ing sink under them? 1 Lin one word, what and how 
produced was the effect of society on him ; what and 
how produced was his effect on society ? He who 
should answer these questions, in regard to any indi- 

25 vidual, would, as we believe, furnish a model of per- 






BURNS 



*J 



fection in Biography. Few individuals, indeed, can 
deserve such a study ; and many lives will be written, 
and, for the gratification of innocent curiosity, ought 
to be written, and read and forgotten, which are not 
in this sense biographies. But Burns, if we mistake 5 
not, is one of these few individuals ; and such a study, 
at least with such a result, he has not yet obtained. 
Our own contributions to it, we are aware, can be but 
scanty and feeble ; but we offer them with good-will, 
and trust they may meet with acceptance from those 10 
they are intended for. 

• Burns first came upon the world as a prodigy ; and 
was, in that character, entertained by it, in the usual 
fashion, with loud, vague, tumultuous wonder, speed- 
ily subsiding into censure and neglect ; till his early 1 
and most mournful death again awakened an enthu- 
siasm for him, which, especially as there was now 
nothing to be done, and much to be spoken, has pro- 
longed itself even to our own time. It is true, the 
'nine days' have long since elapsed; and the very 20 
continuance of this clamor proves that Burns was no 
vulgar wonder. Accordingly, even in sober judgments, 
where, as years passed by, he has come to rest more and 
more exclusively on his own intrinsic merits, and may 



BURNS 

now be well-nigh shorn of that casual radiance, he 
appears not only as a true British poet, but as one of 
the most considerable British men of the eighteenth 
century. ! Let it not be objected that he did little. 
5 He did much, if we consider where and how. If the 
work performed was small, we must remember that 
he had his very materials to discover ; for the metal 
he worked in lay hid under the desert moor where no 
eye but his had guessed its existence; and we may 

io almost say, that with his own hand he had to con- 
struct the tools for fashioning it. For he found 
himself in deepest obscurity, without help, without 
instruction, without model ; or with models only of 
the meanest sort. An' educated man stands, as it 

15 were, in the midst of a boundless arsenal and maga- 
zine, filled with all the weapons and engines which 
man's skill has been able to devise from the earliest 
time ; and he works accordingly, with a strength bor- 
rowed from all past ages. How different is his state 

20 who stands on the outside of that storehouse, and 
feels that its gates must be stormed, or remain for- 
ever shut against him ! His means are the common- 
est and rudest ; the mere work done is no measure of 
his strength. A dwarf behind his steam-engine may 

25 remove mountains ; but no dwarf will hew them down 



BURNS 9 

with a pickaxe : and he must be a Titan that hurls 
them abroad with his arms. 

* ' It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself. 
,'Born in an age the most prosaic Britain had yet seen, 
and in a condition the most disadvantageous, where 
his mind, if it accomplished aught, must accomplish 
it under the pressure of continual bodily toil, nay, of 
penury and desponding apprehension of the worst 
evils, and with no furtherance but such knowledge as 
dwells in a poor man's hut, and the rhymes of a Fer- [0 
guson or Eamsay for his standard of beauty, he sinks 
not under all these impediments: through the fogs 
and darkness .of that obscure region, his lynx eye dis- 
cerns the true relations of the world and human life ; 
he grows into intellectual strength, and trains himself i j 
into intellectual expertness. Impelled by the expan- 
sive movement of his own irrepressible soul, he strug- 
gles forward into the general view ; and with haughty 
modesty lays down before us, as the fruit of his labor, 
a gift, which Time has now pronounced imperishable. . 
Add to all this, that his darksome drudging childhood 
and youth was by far the kindliest era of his whole 
life ; and that he died in his thirty-seventh year : and 
then ask, If it be strange that his poems are imperfect, 
and of small extent, or that his genius attained no 25 



10 BURNS 

mastery in its art ? Alas, his Sun shone as through 
a tropical tornado ; and the pale Shadow of Death 
eclipsed it at noon ! Shrouded in such baleful vapors, 
the genius of Burns was never seen in clear azure 

5 splendor, enlightening the world : but some beams 
from it did, by fits, pierce through ; and it tinted 
those clouds with rainbow and orient colors into a 
glory and stern grandeur, which men silently gazed 
on with wonder and tears ! 

10 " We are anxious not to exaggerate ; for it is exposi- 
tion rather than admiration that our readers require 
of us here ; and yet to avoid some tendency to that 
side is no easy matter. ' We love Burns, and we pity 
him ; and love and pity are prone to magnify. Criti- 

15 cism, it is sometimes thought, should be a cold busi- 
ness ; we are not so sure of this ; but, at all events, our 
concern with Burns is not exclusively that of critics. 
True and genial as his poetry must appear, it is not 
chiefly as a poet, but as a man, that he interests and 

20 affects us. ^ He was often advised to write a tragedy : 
time and means were not lent him for this ; but through 
life he enacted a tragedy, and one of the deepest. We 
question whether the world has since witnessed so 
utterly sad a scene ; whether Napoleon himself, left 

25 to brawl with Sir Hudson Lowe,° and perish on his 



BURNS 11 

rock 'amid the melancholy main,' presented to the 
reflecting mind such a ' spectacle of pity and fear' 
as did this intrinsically nobler, gentler and perhaps 
greater soul, wasting itself away in a hopeless struggle 
with base entanglements, which coiled closer and closer 5 
round him, till only death opened him an outlet? Con- 
querors are a class of men with whom, for most part, the 
world could well dispense ; nor can the hard intellect, 
the unsympathizing loftiness and high but selfish enthu- 
siasm of such persons inspire us in general with any 10 
affection ; at best it may excite amazement ; and their 
fall, like that of a pyramid, will be beheld with a certain 
sadness and awe< But a true Poet, a man in whose heart 
resides some effluence of Wisdom, some tone of .the 
'Eternal Melodies,' is the most precious gift that can 15 
■be bestowed on a generation : we see in him a freer, 
purer development of whatever is noblest in ourselves ; 
(his life is a rich lesson to us ; and we mourn his death 
'as that of a benefactor who loved and taught us. 

Such a gift had Nature, in her bounty, bestowed on 20 
us in Eobert Burns ; but with queenlike indifference 
she cast it from her hand, like a thing of no moment ; 
and it was defaced and torn asunder, as an idle bauble, 
before we recognized it. To the ill-starred Burns was 
given the power of making man's life more venerable, 25 



12 BURNS 

but that of wisely guiding his own life was not given. 
Destiny,'— for so in our ignorance we must speak, — 
his faults, the faults of others, proved too hard for 
him ; and that spirit which might have soared could it 
5 but have walked, soon sank to the dust, its glorious 
faculties trodden under foot in the blossom ; and died, 
we may almost say, without ever having lived. And 
so kind and warm a soul ; so full of inborn, riches, of 
love to all living and lifeless things ! How his heart 
io flows out in sympathy over universal Nature ; and in 
her bleakest provinces discerns a beauty and a mean- 
ing ! 1/ The ' Daisy ' ° falls not unheeded under his 
ploughshare ; nor the ruined nest of that ' wee, cower- 
ing, timorous beastie,' ° cast forth, after all its provi- 
15 dent pains, to ' thole the sleety dribble and cranreuch 
cauld.' The ' hoar visage ' of Winter delights him ; 
he dwells with a sad and oft-returning fondness in 
these scenes of solemn desolation; but the voice of 
the tempest becomes an anthem to his ears ; he loves 
20 to walk in the sounding woods, ' it raises his thoughts ° 
to Him that walketh on the wings of the wind.' A true 
Poet-soul, for it needs but to be struck, and the sound 
it yields will be music ! But observe him chiefly as 
he mingles with his brother men. What warm, ali- 
as comprehending fellow-feeling; what trustful, bound- 



BURNS 13 

less love; what generous exaggeration of the object 
loved ! His rustic friend, his nut-brown maiden, are 
no longer mean and homely, but a hero and a queen, 
whom he prizes as the paragons of Earth. ' The rough 
scenes of Scottish life, not seen by him in any Area- 5 
dian illusion, but in the rude contradiction, in the 
smoke and soil of a too harsh reality, are still lovely 
to him : Poverty is indeed his companion, but Love 
also, and Courage ; the simple feelings, the worth, the 
nobleness, that dwell under the straw roof, are dear 10 
and venerable to his heart? and thus over the lowest 
provinces of man's existence he pours the glory of his 
own soul ; and they rise, in shadow and sunshine, 
softened and brightened into a beauty which other 
eyes discern not in the highest. He has a just self- 15 
consciousness, which too often degenerates into pride ; 
yet it is a noble pride, for defence, not for offence ; no . 
cold suspicious feeling, but a frank and social one. 
The Peasant Poet bears himself, we might say, like a 
King in exile: he is cast among the low, and feels 20 
himself equal to the highest ; yet he claims no rank, 
that none may be disputed to him. The forward he 
can repel, the supercilious he can subdue ; pretensions 
of wealth or ancestry are of no avail with him ; there 
is a fire in that dark eye, under which the ' insolence 25 



14 BURNS 

of condescension' cannot thrive. In his abasement, 
in his extreme need, he forgets not for a moment the 
majesty of Poetry and Manhood. And yet, far as 
he feels himself above common men, he wanders not 

5 apart from them, but mixes warmly in their interests ; 
nay, throws himself into their arms, and, as it were, 
entreats them to love him. It is moving to see how, 
in his darkest despondency, this proud being still 
seeks relief from friendship ; unbosoms himself, often 

io to the unworthy ; and, amid tears, strains to his glow- 
ing heart a heart that knows only the name of friend- 
ship. And yet he was ' quick to learn ' ; a man of keen 
vision, before whom common disguises afforded no con- 
cealment. His understanding saw through the hollow- 

15 ness even of accomplished deceiversj but there war. a 
generous credulity in his heart. I And so did r ir 
Peasant show himself among us; <a soul like 1 
iEolian harp, in whose strings the vulgar wind, d 
passed through them, changed itself into articulate 

20 melody.' And this was he for whom the world found 
no fitter business than quarrelling with smugglers and 
vintners, computing excise-dues upon tallow, and gaug- 
ing ale-barrels ! In such toils was that mighty Spirit 
sorrowfully wasted : and a hundred years may pass on, 

25 before another such is given us to waste. 



BURNS 15 

-All that remains of Burns, the Writings lie has left, 
seem to us*, as we hinted above, no more than a poor 
mutilated fraction of what was in him ; brief, broken 
glimpses of a genius that could never show itself 
complete ; that wanted all things for completeness : 5 
culture, leisure, true effort, nay, even length of life. 
His poems are, with scarcely any exception, mere occa- 
sional effusions ; poured forth with little premeditation ; 
expressing, by such means as offered, the passion, opin- 
ion, or humor of the hour. Never in one instance was 10 
it permitted him to grapple with any subject with the 
full collection of his strength, to fuse and mould it in 
the concentrated lire of his genius.. ■ To try by the 
strict rules of Art such imperfect fragments, would be 
at .once unprofitable and unfair. Nevertheless, there 15 
is something in these poems, marred and defective as 
the are, which forbids the most fastidious student of 
poet v to pass them by J Some sort of enduring qual- 
ity they must have : for after fifty years of the wildest 
vicissitudes in poetic taste, they still continue to be 20 
read ; nay, are read more and more eagerly, more and 
more extensively ; and this not only by literary vir- 
tuosos, and that class upon whom transitory causes 
opefrate most strongly, but by all classes, down to the 

nost hard, unlettered and truly natural class, who 25 



16 BURNS 

read little, and especially no poetry, except because 
they find pleasure in it. The grounds of so singu- 
lar and wide a popularity, which extends, in a literal 
sense, from the palace to the hut, and over all regions 
5 where the English tongue is spoken, are well worth 
inquiring into. After every just deduction, it seems 
to imply some rare excellence in these works. What 
is that excellence ? 

To answer this question will not lead us far. The 

10 excellence of Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, 
whether in poetry or prose ; but, at the same time, it 
is plain and easily recognized : his Sincerity, his indis- 
putable air of Truth. Here are no fabulous woes or 
joys; no hollow fantastic sentimentalities; no wire- 

15 drawn refinings, either in thought or feeling : the pas- 
sion that is traced before us has glowed in a living 
heart; the opinion he utters has risen in his own under- 
standing, and been a light to his own steps. He does 
not write from hearsay, but from sight and experience; 

20 it is the scenes that he has lived and labored amidst, 
that he describes : those scenes, rude and humble as 
they are, have kindled beautiful emotions in his soul, 
noble thoughts, and definite resolves; and he speaks 
forth what is in him, not from any outward call of 

25 vanity or interest, but because his heart is too full to 



BUENS 17 

be silent. (He speaks it with such melody and modu- 
lation as he can; 'in homely rustic jingle'; but it is 
his own, and genuine. This is the grand secret for 
rinding readers and retaining them : let him who 
would move and convince others, be first moved and 5 
convinced himself. Horace's rule, Si vis me Jlere,° is 
applicable in a wider sense than the literal one. To 
every poet, to every writer, we might say : Be true, if 
you would be believed. Let a man but speak forth 
with genuine earnestness the thought, the emotion, the 10 
actual condition of his own heart ; and other men, so 
strangely are we all knit together by the tie of sym- 
pathy, must and will give heed to him. In culture, 
in extent of view, we may stand above the speaker, or 
below him ; but in either case, his words, if they are 15 
earnest and sincere, will find some response within us ; 
for in spite of all casual varieties in outward rank or 
inward, as face answers to face, so does the heart of 
man to man. 

This may appear a very simple principle, and one 20 
which Burns had little merit in discovering. True, 
the discovery is easy enough : but the practical appli- 
ance is not easy ; is indeed the fundamental difficulty 
which all poets have to strive with, and which scarcely 
one in the hundred ever fairly surmounts. A head 25 



18 BURNS 

too dull to discriminate the true from the false; a 
heart too dull to love the one at all risks, and to hate 
the other in spite of all temptations, are alike fatal to 
a writer. With either, or as more commonly happens, 
5 with both of these deficiencies combine a love of dis- 
tinction, a wish to be original, which is seldom want- 
ing, and we have Affectation .j the bane of literature, 
as Cant, its elder brother, is of morals. How often 
does the one and the other front us, in poetry, as in 

io life ! Great poets themselves are not always free of 
this vice ; nay, it is precisely on a certain sort and 
degree of greatness that it is most commonly ingrafted. 
A strong effort after excellence will sometimes solace 
itself with a mere shadow of success ; he who has 

15 much to unfold, will sometimes unfold it imper- 
fectly. Byron, for instance, was no common man : 
yet if we examine his poetry with this view, we shall 
find it far enough from faultless. Generally speaking, 
we should say that it is not true. He refreshes us, 

20 not with the divine fountain, but too often with vul- 
gar strong waters, stimulating indeed to the taste, but 
soon ending in dislike, or even nausea. Are his Har- 
olds and Giaours, we would ask, real men; we mean, 
poetically consistent and conceivable men ? Do not 

25 these characters, does not the character of their author, 



BURNS 19 

which more or less shines through them all, rather 
appear a thing put on for the occasion ; no natural or 
possible mode of being, but something intended to 
look much grander than nature? Surely, all these 
stormful agonies, this volcanic heroism, superhuman 5 
contempt and moody desperation, with so much scowl- 
ing, and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous humor, 
is more like the brawling of a player in some paltry 
tragedy, which is to last three hours, than the bearing 
of a man in the business of life, which is to last three- 10 
score and ten years. To our minds, there is a taint of 
this sort, something which we should call theatrical, 
false, affected, in every one of these otherwise so pow- 
erful pieces. Perhaps Don Juan, especially the latter 
parts of it, is the only thing approaching to a sincere 15 
work, he ever wrote ; the only work where he showed 
himself, in any measure, as he was; and seemed so 
intent on his subject as, for moments, to forget him- 
self, ^fcet Byron hated this vice ; we believe, heartily 
detested it : nay, he had declared formal war against 20 
it in words. So difficult is it even for the strongest 
to make this primary attainment, which might seem 
the simplest of all : to read its own consciousness ivith- 
out mistakes, without errors involuntary or wilful ! 
We recollect no poet of Burns's susceptibility who 25 



20 BUBJVS 

comes before us from the first, and abides with, us to 
the last, with such a total want of affectation. He is 
an honest man, and an honest writer. In his successes 
and his failures, in his greatness and his littleness, he 

5 is ever clear, simple, true, and glitters with no lustre 
but his own. We reckon this to be a great virtue ; to 
be, in fact, the root of most other virtues, literary as 
well as moral. 

Here, however, let us say, it is to the Poetry of 

io Burns that we now allude; to those writings which 
he had time to meditate, and where no special reason 
existed to warp his critical feeling, or obstruct his 
endeavor to fulfil it. Certain of his Letterv-and 
other fractions of prose composition, by no means 

15 deserve this praise. Here, doubtless, there is not 
the same natural truth of style; but on the con- 
trary, something not only stiff, but strained and 
twisted; a certain highflown inflated tonej the stilt- 
ing emphasis of which contrasts ill with the firmness 

20 and rugged simplicity of even his poorest verses. 
Thus no man, it would appear, is altogether unaf- 
fected. Does not Shakespeare himself sometimes pre- 
meditate the sheerest bombast ! But even with regard 
to these Letters of Burns, it is but fair to state that 

25 he had two excuses. The first was his comparative 



BURNS 21 

deficiency in language. Burns, though for the most 
part he writes with singular force, and even graceful- 
ness, is not master of English prose, as he is of Scottish 
verse; not master of it, we mean, in proportion to the 
depth and vehemence of his matter. These Letters 5 
strike us as the effort of a man to express something 
which he has no organ fit for expressing. But a sec- 
ond and weightier excuse is to be found in the pecu- 
liarity of Burns's social rank. His correspondents 
are often men whose relation to him he has never 10 
accurately ascertained; whom therefore he is either 
forearming himself against, or else unconsciously 
flattering, by adopting the style he thinks will 
please them. At all events, we should remember 
that these faults, even in his Letters, are not the 15 
rule, but the exception. Whenever he writes, as one 
would ever wish to do, to trusted friends and on real 
interests, his style becomes simple, vigorous, expres- 
sive, sometimes even beautiful. His letters to Mrs. 
Dunlop are uniformly excellent. 20 

But we return to his Poetry. In addition to its 
Sincerity, it has another peculiar merit, which indeed 
is but a mode, or perhaps a means, of the foregoing : 
this displays itself in his choice of subjects ; or rather 
in his indifference as to subjects, and the power he 25. 



22 BUENS 

has of making all subjects interesting. The ordinary 
poet, like the ordinary man, is forever seeking in 
external circumstances the help which can be found 
only in himself. In what is familiar and near at hand, 
5 he discerns no form or comeliness : home is not poeti- 
cal, but prosaic; it is in some past, distant, conven- 
tional heroic world, that poetry resides j were he there 
and not here, were he thus and not so, it would be 
well with him. Hence our innumerable host of rose- 

10 colored Novels and iron-mailed Epics, with their local- 
ity not on the Earth, but somewhere nearer to the 
Moon. Hence our Virgins of the Sun,° and our 
Knights of the Cross, malicious Saracens in turbans, 
and copper-colored Chiefs in wampum, and so many 

15 other truculent figures from the heroic times or the 
heroic climates, who on all hands swarm in our poetry. 
Peace be with them! But yet, as a great moralist 
proposed preaching to the men of this century, so 
would we fain preach to the poets, 'a sermon on the 

20 duty of staying at home.' Let them be sure that 
heroic ages and heroic climates can do little for them. 
That form of life has attraction for us, less because it 
is better or nobler than our own, than simply because 
it is different ; and even this attraction must be of the 

25 most transient sort. For will not our own age, one 



BURNS 23 

■ 

day, be an ancient one ; and have as quaint a costume 
as the rest; not contrasted with the rest, therefore, 
but ranked along with them, in respect of quaintness ? 
D oes Homer interest us now, because he wrote of 
what passed beyond his native Greece, and twos 
centuries before he was born ; or because he wrote 
what passed in God's world, and in the heart of 
man, which is the same after thirty centuries ? Let 
our poets look to this: is their feeling really finer, 
truer, and their vision deeper than that of other 10 
men, — they have nothing to fear, even from the 
humblest subject; is it not so, — they have nothing 
to hope, but an ephemeral favor, even from the 
highest. 

The poet, we imagine, can never have far to seek 15 
for a subject: the elements of his art are in him, and 
around him on every hand; for him the Ideal world 
is not remote from the Actual, but under it and within 
it : nay, he is a poet, precisely because he can discern 
it there. Wherever there is a sky above him, and a 20 
world around him, the poet is in his place ; for here 
too is man's existence, with its infinite longings and 
small acquirings ; its ever-thwarted, ever-renewed en- 
deavors ; its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and 
hopes that wander through Eternity; and all the 25 



24 BURNS 

mystery of brightness and of gloom that it was ever 
made of, in any age or climate, since man first began 
to live. Is there not the fifth act of a Tragedy in 
every death-bed, though it were a peasant's, and a 

5 bed of heath ? And are wooings and weddings obso- 
lete, that there can be Comedy no longer ? Or are 
men suddenly grown wise, that Laughter must no 
longer shake his sides, but be cheated of his Farce ? 
Man's life and nature is, as it was, and as it will ever 

io be. But the poet must have an eye to read these 
things, and a heart to understand them ; or they 
come and pass away before him in vain. He is a 
vates,° a seer; a gift of vision has been given him. 
Has life no meanings for him, which another cannot 

15 equally decipher ; then he is no poet, and Delphi 
itself will not make him one. 

In this respect, Burns, though not perhaps abso- 
lutely a great poet, better manifests his capability, 
better proves the truth of his genius, than if he had, 

20 by his own strength, kept the whole Minerva Press 
going, to the end of his literary course. He shows 
himself at least a poet of Nature's own making ; and 
Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making 
poets. We often hear of this and the other external 

25 condition being requisite for the existence of a poet. 



BURNS 25 

Sometimes it is a certain sort of training; he must 
have studied certain things, studied for instance 'the 
elder dramatists/ and so learned a poetic language; 
as if poetry lay in the tongue, not in the heart. At 
other times we are told he must be bred in a certain 5 
rank, and must be on a confidential footing with the 
higher classes ; because, above all things, he must see 
the world. As to seeing the world, we apprehend 
this will cause him little difficulty, if he have but 
eyesight to see it with. Without eyesight, indeed, 10 
the task might be hard. The blind or the purblind 
man 'travels from Dan to Beersheba, and finds it all 
barren.' But happily every poet is born in the world; I 
and sees it, with or against his will, every day and | 
every hour he lives. \ The mysterious workmanship 15 
of man's heart, the true light and the inscrutable 
darkness of man's destiny, reveal themselves not 
only in capital cities and crowded saloons, but in 
every hut and hamlet where men have their abode! 
N"ay, do not the elements of all human virtues and 20 
all human vices ; the passions at once of a Borgia and 
of a Luther, lie written, in stronger or fainter lines, 
in the consciousness of every individual bosom, that 
has practised honest self-examination ? Truly, this 
same world may be seen in Mossgiel and Tarbolton, 25 



26 BURNS 

if we look well, as clearly as it ever came to light in 
Crockford's, or the Tuileries itself. 

But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid on 
the poor aspirant to poetry, for it is hinted that he 

5 should have been born two centuries ago ;° inasmuch 
as poetry, about that date, vanished from the earth, 
and became no longer attainable by men! Such cob- 
web speculations have, now and then, overhung the 
field of literature ; but they obstruct not the growth 

io of any plant there : the Shakespeare or the Burns, un- 
consciously and merely as he walks onward, silently 
brushes them away. Is not every genius an impossi- 
bility till he appear ? Why do we call him new and 
original, if ive saw where his marble was lying, and 

is what fabric he could rear from it ? It is not the 
material but the workman that is wanting. -J.lt is not 
the dark place that hinders, but the dim eye'*; A Scot- 
tish peasant's life was the meanest and rudest of all 
lives, till Burns became a poet in it, and a poet of it ; 

20 found it a man's life, and therefore significant to men. 
A thousand battle-fields remain unsung; but the 
Wounded Hare has not perished without its memo- 
rial ; a balm of mercy yet breathes on us from its 
dumb agonies, because a poet was there. Our Hallo- 

25 ween had passed and repassed, in rude awe and laugh- 



BURNS 27 

ter, since the era of the Druids ; but no Theocritus, 
till Burns, discerned in it the materials of a Scottish 
Idyl : neither was the Holy Fair any Council of Trent 
or Roman Jubilee ; but nevertheless, Superstition and 
Hypocrisy and Fun having been propitious to him, in 5 
phis man's hand it became a poem, instinct with satire 
and genuine comic life. Let, bnt_i^e._jtrjie. poet be 
jiven us, we repeat it, place him where and how you 
will, and true poetry will not b e wanting ^ ^^ 

Independently of the essential gift of poetic feeling, 10 
as we have now attempted to describe it, a .certain 
digged sterling wortly pervades whatever Burns has 
written; a virtue, as of green fields and mountain 
oreezes, dwells in his poetry ; it is redolent of natural 
life and hardy natural men. /There is a decisive 15 
strength in him, and yet a sweet native gracefulness : 
he is tender, he is vehement, yet without constraint 
or too visible effort ; he melts the heart, or inflames it, 
with a power which seems habitual and familiar to 
him. J We see that in this man there was the gentle- 20 
ness, the trembling pity of a woman, with the deep 
earnestness, the force and passionate ardor of a hero. 
Tears lie in him, and consuming fire; as lightning 
lurks in the drops of the summer cloud. ; He has a 
resonance in his bosom for every note of human feel- 25 



28 BURNS 

ing ; the high and the low, the sad, the ludicrous, the 
joyful, are welcome in their turns to his ' lightly- 
moved and all-conceiving spirit.' And observe with 
what a fierce prompt force he grasps his subject, be it 

5 what it may ! * How he fixes, as it were, the full 
image of the matter in his eye ; full and clear in every 
lineament ; and catches the real type and essence of 
it, amid a thousand accidents and superficial circum- 
stances, no one of which misleads him f Is it of rea- 

10 son, some truth to be discovered ? No sophistry, no 
vain surface-logic detains him ; quick, resolute, unerr- 
ingfhe pierces through into the marrow of the ques- 
tion ; and speaks his verdict with an emphasis that 
cannot be forgottemjls it of description; some visual 

15 object to be represented? No poet of any age or 
nation is more graphic than Burns : the characteristic 
features disclose themselves to him at a glance; three 
lines from his hand, and we have a likeness. And, in 
that rough dialect, in that rude, often awkward metre, 

20 so clear and definite a likeness ! It seems a draughts- 
man working with a burnt stick ; and yet the burin 
of a Retzsch is not more expressive or exact. 

Of this last excellence, the plainest and most com- 
prehensive of all, being indeed the root and foundation 

25 of every sort of talent, poetical or intellectual, we could 



BUBXS 29 

produce innumerable instances from the writings of 
Burns. Take these glimpses of a snow-storm from 
his Winter Night (the italics are ours) ; 

When biting Boreas, fell and doure, 

Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r, 5 

And Phcebus gies a short-liv'd glowr° 

Far south the lift, 
Dim-dark" 1 ning thro' the flaky shower 

Or whirling drift : 

Ae night the storm the steeples rock'd, 10 

Poor labor sweet in sleep was lock'd, 
While burns wV snawy wreeths upchok^d 

Wild-eddying swirl, 
Or thro' the mining outlet bock'd° 

Down headlong hurl. 15 

Are there not ' descriptive touches ' here ? The 
describer saiv this thing; the essential feature and 
true likeness of every circumstance in it; saw, and 
not with the eye only. ' Poor labor locked in sweet 
sleep'; the dead stillness of man, unconscious, van- 20 
quished, yet not unprotected, while such strife of the 
material elements rages, and seems to reign supreme 
in loneliness: this is of the heart as well as of the 
eye ! — Look also at his image of a thaw, and prophe- 
ied fall of the Auld Brig : 25 






30 BURNS 

When heavy, dark, continued, a'-day rains, 
Wi' deepening deluges o'erflow the plains ; 
When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil, 
Or stately Lugar's mossy fountains boil, 
5 Or where the Greenock winds his moorland course, 

Or haunted Garpal 1 draws his feeble source, 
Arous'd by blust'ring winds and spotting thowes, 
In mony a torrent down his snaw-broo° rowes; 
While crashing ice, borne on the roaring spate, 
io Sweeps dams and mills and brigs «' to the gate; 

And from Glenbuck down to the Ratton-key, 
Auld Ayr is just one lengthen'd, tumbling sea ; 
Then down ye'll hurl, Deil nor ye never rise ! 
And dash the gumlie jaiips up to the pouring skies. 

15 The last line is in itself a Poussin-picture of that 
Deluge ! The welkin has, as it were, bent down with 
its weight; the 'gumlie jaups' and the 'pouring 
skies ' are mingled together ; it is a world of rain 
and ruin. — In respect of mere clearness and minute 

20 fidelity, the Farmer's commendation of his Auld Mare, 
in plough or in cart, may vie with Homer's Smithy of 
the Cyclops, or yoking of Priam's Chariot. Nor have 
we forgotten stout Burn-the-wind° and his brawny cus- 
tomers, inspired by Scotch Drink: but it is needless 

25 to multiply examples. One other trait of a much finer 

1 Fdbulosus Hydaspes !° 



an 31 

sort we select from multitudes of such among his 
Soui/s. It gives, in a single line, to the saddest feel- 
ing the saddest environment and local habitation : 

Tlie pale 3Ioon is setting beyond the white wave, 
And time is setting wV me, 0'; 5 

Farewell, false friends ! false lover, farewell ! 
I'll nae mair trouble them nor thee, 0. 

;This clearness of sight we have called the founda- 
tion of all talent; for in fact, unless we see our object, 
how shall we knQw_hpw__tp_,place_or_ prize it, in o ur 10 
understanding, our imagination, our affections ? Yet 
it is not in itself perhaps, a very high excellence ; but 
capable of being united indifferently with the strong- 
est, or with ordinary power. Homer surpasses all men 
in this quality: but strangely enough, at no great dis-15 
tance below him are Richardson and Defoe. It belongs, 
in truth, to what is called a lively mind ; and gives no 
sure indication of the higher endowments that may 
exist along with it. In all the three cases we have 
mentioned, it is combined with great garrulity ; their 20 
descriptions are detailed, ample and lovingly exact; 
Homer's fire bursts through, from time to time, as if 
by accident ; but Defoe and Richardson have no fire. 
Burns, again, is not more distinguished by the clear- 
ness than by the impetuous force of his conceptions. 25 



32 BURNS 

Of the strength, the piercing emphasis with which he 
thought, his emphasis of expression may give a hum- 
bl*fe but the readiest proof. Who ever uttered sharper 
sayings than his ; words more memorable, now by 
5 their burning vehemence, now by their cool vigor and 
laconic pith ? A single phrase depicts a whole sub- 
ject, a whole scene. We hear of i a gentleman that de- 
rived his patent of nobility direct from the Almighty 
God.' Our Scottish forefathers in the battle-field 
10 struggled forward, he says, i red-wat-shod ' ° : giving 
in this one word, a full vision of horror and carnage, 
perhaps too frightfully accurate for Art ! 
fin fact, one of the leading features in the mind of 
Burns is this vigor of his strictly intellectual percep- 
tions. A resolute force is ever visible Jn his judg- 
ments, and m his feelings and volitions.. Professor 
Stewart says of him, with some surprise: 'All the 
faculties of Burns's mind were,, as far as I could judge, 
equally vigorous ; and his predilection for x^oetry was 
20 rather the result of his own enthusiastic and impas- 
sioned temper, than of a genius exclusively adapted 
to that species of composition. From his conversation 
I should have pronounced him to be fitted to excel in 
whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his 
25 abilities.' But this, if we mistake not, is at all times 



BURNS 33 

the very essence of a truly poetical endowment. 
Pofilry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where 
• the whole consists in a weak-eyed maudlin sensibility, 
; , and a certain vague random tunefulness of nature, is_ 
no separate faculty, no organ which can be superadded 5 
to the rest, or disjoined from them ; but rather the 
result of their general harmony and completion. The 
feelings, the gifts, that exist in the Poet are those that 
exist, with more or less development, in every human 
soul : the imagination, which shudders at the Hell of 10 
Dante, is the same faculty, weaker in degree, which 
called that picture into being. I How does the Poet 
speak to men, with power, but by being still more a 
man than they? Shakespeare, it has been well ob- 
served, in the planning and completing of his tragedies, 15 
has shown an Understanding, were it nothing more, 
which might have governed states, or indicted a Novum 
Organum. What Burns's force of understanding may 
have been, we have less means of judging : it had to 
dwell among the humblest objects; never saw Phi- 20 
losophy ; never rose, except by natural effort and for 
tervals, into the region of great ideas. Never- 
theless, sufficient indication, if no proof sufficient, 
8 for us in his works : we discern the brawny 
movements of a gigantic though untutored strength ; 25 



34 BUBNS 

and can understand how, in conversation, his quick 
sure insight into men and things may, as much as 
aught else about him, have amazed the best thinkers 
of his time and country. 

5 But, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of 
Burns is fine as well as strong. The more delicate 
relations of things could not well have escaped his 
eye, for they were intimately present to his heart. 
The logic of the senate and the forum is indispensa- 

io ble, but not all-sufficient ; nay, perhaps the highest 
Truth is that which will the most certainly elude it. 
For this logic works by words, and ' the highest,' it 
has been said, 'cannot be expressed in words.' We 
are not without tokens of an openness for this higher 

15 truth also, of a keen though uncultivated sense for 
it, having existed in Burns. Mr. Stewart, it will be 
remembered, 'wonders,' in the passage above quoted, 
that Burns had formed some distinct conception of 
the ' doctrine of association.' ° We rather think that 

20 far subtler things than the doctrine of association had 

from of old been familiar to him. Here for instance : 

' We know nothing,' ° thus writes he, ' or ne: to 

nothing, of the structure of our souls, so we cannot 

account for those seeming caprices in them, tha ne 

25 should be particularly pleased with this thing, or 



BURXS 35 

struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, 
makes no extraordinary impression. I have some 
favorite flowers in spring, among which are the moun- 
tain-daisy, the harebell, the foxglove, the wild-brier 
rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that 5 
I view and hang over with particular delight. I never 
hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a sum- 
mer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of 
gray plover in an autumnal morning, without feeling 
an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion 10 
or poetry. Tell me, my clear friend, to what can this 
be owing ? Are we a piece of machinery, which, like 
the iEolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the 
passing accident ; or do these workings argue some- 
thing within us above the trodden clod ? I own myself 15 
partial to such proofs of those awful and important 
realities : a God that made all things, man's imma- 
terial and immortal nature, and a world of weal or 
woe beyond death and the grave.' 

Force and fineness of understanding/are often spoken 20 
of as something different from general force and fine- 
ness of nature, as something partly independent of 
them. The necessities of language so require it; but 
in truth these qualities are not distinct and indepen- 
dent : except in special cases, and from special causes, 25 



36 BUBXS 

tliey ever go together. A man of strong understand- 
ing is generally a man of strong character ; neither is 
delicacy in the one kind often divided from delicacy 
in the other. \No one, at all events, is ignorant that 

5 in the Poetry oT Burns keenness of insight keeps pace 
with keenness of feeling; that his light is not more 
pervading than his warmth. He is a man of the most 
impassioned temper; with passions not strong only, 
but noble, and of the sort in which great virtues and 

io great poems take their rise. It is reverence, it is love 
towards all Nature that inspires him, that opens his 
eyes to its beauty, and makes heart and voice eloquenl 
in its praise. There is a true old saying, that ' Lovt 
furthers knowledge ' : but above all, it is the living 

15 essence of that knowledge which makes poets ; the 
first principle of its existence, increase, activity. Oi 
Burns's fervid affection, his generous all-embracing 
Love, we have spoken already, as of the grand dis- 
tinction of his nature, seen equally in word and deed. 

20 in his Life and in his Writings. It were easy to mul- 
tiply examples. Not man only, but all that environ 
man in the material and moral universe, is lovely h 
his sight : ' the hoary hawthorn,' the ' troop of graj 
plover,' the ' solitary curlew,' all are dear to him ; -a 

25 live in this Earth along with him, and to all he is kn 



1 



Briars 37 

as in mysterious brotherhood. How touching is it, for 
instance, that, amidst the gloom of personal misery, 
brooding over the wintry desolation without him and 
within him, he thinks of the ' ourie cattle ' and ' silly 
sheep,' and their sufferings in the pitiless storm ! 5 

I thought me on the ourie cattle, 
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 

O' wintry war, 
Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle, 

Beneath a scar. 10 

Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing, 
That in the merry months o' spring 
Delighted me to hear thee sing, 

What comes o' thee ? 
Where wilt thou cow'r thy cluttering wing, 15 

An close thy ee ? 

The tenant of the mean hut, with its ' ragged roof and 
chinky wall,' has a heart to pity even these ! This is 
worth several homilies on Mercy ; for it is the voice 
of Mercy herself. Burns, indeed, lives in sympathy; 20 
his soul rushes forth into all realms of being; nothing 
that has existence can be indifferent to him. The 
very Devil he cannot hate with right orthodoxy: 

But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben ; 

0, wad ye tak' a thought and men' ! 25 



38 



BURNS 



Ye aiblins might, — I dinna ken, — 
Still hae a stake ; 

I'm wae to think upo' yon den, 

Even for your sake ! 

5 " He is the father of curses and lies," said Dr. Slop ; 
"and is cursed and damned already." — "I am sorry 
for it," quoth my uncle Toby ! — a Poet without 
Love were a physical and metaphysical impossi- 
bility. 

io But has it not been said, in contradiction to this 
principle, that ' Indignation makes verses ' ° ? It has 
been so said, and is true enough : but the contradic- 
tion is apparent, not real. The Indignation which 
makes verses is, properly speaking, an inverted Love j 

i 5 the love of some right, some worth, some goodness, 
belonging to ourselves or others, which has been 
injured, and which this tempestuous feeling issues 
forth to defend and avenge. No selfish fury of heart, 
existing there as a primary feeling, and without its 

20 opposite, ever produced much Poetry : otherwise, we 
suppose, the Tiger were the most musical of all our 
choristers. Qphnson said, he loved a good hater ; by 
which he must have meant, not so much one that 
hated violently, as one that hated wisely ; hated 

25 baseness from love of nobleness. However, in spite 



BURNS 39 

of Johnson's paradox, tolerable enough for once in 
speech, but which need not have been so often adopted 
in print since then, we rather believe that good men 
deal sparingly in hatred, either wise or unwise : nay, 
that a i good ' hater is still a desideratum in this 5 
world. The Devil, at least, who passes for the chief 
and best of that class, is said to be nowise an amiable 
character. 

Of the verses which Indignation makes, Burns has 
also given us specimens : and among the best that 10 
were ever given. Who will forget his ' Dweller in yon 
Dungeon dark ' ; a piece that might have been chanted 
by the Furies of ^Eschylus ? The secrets of the 
infernal Pit are laid bare ; a boundless, baleful ' dark- 
ness visible ' ; and streaks of hell-fire quivering madly 15 
in its black haggard bosom ! 

Dweller in yon Dungeon dark, 

Hangman of Creation, mark ! 

Who in widow's weeds appears, 

Laden with unhonored years, 20 

Noosing with care a bursting purse 

Baited with many a deadly curse ! 

Why should we speak of Scots ivha hae wV Wallace 
bled; since all know of it, from the king to the mean- 
est of his subjects ? This dithyrambic was composed 25 



40 BUBNS 

on horseback; in riding in the middle of tempests, 
over the wildest Galloway moor, in company with a 
Mr. Syme, who, observing the poet's looks, forbore to 
speak, — judiciously enough, for a man composing 
5 Bruce' s Address might be unsafe to trifle with. 
Doubtless this stern hymn was singing itself, as he 
formed it, through the soul of Burns : but to the ex- 
ternal ear, it should be sung with the throat of the 
whirlwind. So long as there is warm blood in the 

io heart of Scotchman or man, it will move in fierce 
thrills under this war-ode; the best, we believe, that 
was ever written by any pen. 

Another wild stormful Song, that dwells in our ear 
and mind with a strange tenacity, is Macphersorts 

15 Farewell. Perhaps there is something in the tradition 
itself .that cooperates. For was not this grim Celt, 
this shaggy Northland Cacus,° that 'lived a life of 
sturt° and strife, and died by treacherie,' — was- not 
he too one of the Nimrods and Napoleons of the 

20 earth, in the arena of his own remote misty glens, for 
want of a clearer and wider one ? Nay, was there 
not a touch of grace given him ? A fibre of love and 
softness, of poetry itself, must have lived in his sav- 
age heart : for he composed that air the night before 

25 his execution ; on the wings of that poor melody his 



BFRNS 41 

better soul would soar away above oblivion, pain, and 
all the ignominy and despair, which, like an ava- 
lanche, was hurling him to the abyss ! Here also, as 
at Thebes, and in Pelops' line, was material Fate 
matched against man's Free-will ; matched in bitter- 5 
est though obscure duel; and the ethereal soul sank 
not, even in its blindness, without a cry which has 
survived it. But who, except Burns, could have given 
words to such a soul ; words that we never listen to 
without a strange half-barbarous, half-poetic fellow- 10 
f eelinsr ? 






Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, 

Sae dauntingly gaed he ; 
He played a spring and danced it round, 

Beloiv the gallows-tree. 



Under a lighter disguise, the same principle of Love, 
which we have recognized as the great characteristic 
of Burns, and of all true poets, occasionally manifests 
itself in the shape of Humor. Everywhere, indeed, 
in his sunny moods, a full buoyant flood of mirth rolls 20 
through the mind of Burns ; he rises to the high, and 
stoops_to the low, and is brother and playmate to all 
Nature.) We speak not of his bold and often irresisti- 
ble faculty of caricature; for this is Drollery rather 
than Humor: but a much tenderer sportfulness 25 



42 BURNS 

dwells in him; and comes forth here and there, in 
evanescent and beautiful touches ; as in his Address 
to the Mouse, or the Farmer's Mare, or in his Elegy 
on poor Mailie, which last may be reckoned his hap- 
5 piest effort of this kind. In these pieces there are 
traits of a Humor as fine as that of Sterne ; yet 
altogether different, original, peculiar, — the Humor 
of Burns. 
£Of the tenderness, the playful pathos] and many 

io other kindred qualities of Burns's Poetry, much more 
might be said; but now, with these poor outlines of 
a sketch, we must prepare to quit this part of our sub- 
ject. To speak of his individual Writings, adequately 
and with any detail, would lead us far beyond our 

15 limits. \As already hinted, we can look on but few 
of these pieces as, in strict critical language, deserv- 

* ing the name of Poems : they are rhymed eloquence, 
rhymed pathos, rhymed sense ; yet seldom essentially 
melodious, aerial, poetical. Tarn 0' Shanter itself, 

20 which enjoys so high a favor, does not appear to us 
at all decisively to come under this last category. It 
is not so much a poem, as a piece of sparkling rheto- 
ric ; the heart and body of the story still lies hard 
and dead. He has not gone back, much less carried 

25 us back, into that dark, earnest, wondering age, when 



BURNS 43 

the tradition was believed, and when it took its rise ; 
lie does not attempt, by any new-modelling of his 
supernatural ware, to strike anew that deep mysteri- 
ous chord Of human nature, which once responded to 
such things ; and which lives in us too, and will for- 5 
ever live, though silent now, or vibrating with far 
other notes, and to far different issues. Our German 
readers will understand us, when we say, that he is 
not the Tieck but the Musaus of this tale. Exter- 
nally it is all green and living; yet look closer, it is 10 
10 firm growth, but only ivy on a rock. The piece 
does not properly cohere : the strange chasm which 
yawns in our incredulous imaginations between the 
Ayr public-house and the gate of Tophet, is nowhere 
bridged over, nay, the idea of such a bridge is laughed 15 
at; and thus the Tragedy of the adventure becomes 
1 mere drunken phantasmagoria, or many-colored 
(spectrum painted on ale-vapors, and the Farce alone 
has any reality. We do not say that Burns should 
lave made much more of this tradition ; we rather 20 
Ihink that, for strictly poetical purposes, not much 
vas to be made of it. Neither are we blind to the 
deep, varied, genial power displayed in what he has 
actually accomplished; but we find far more 'Shake- 
jpearean ' qualities, as these of Tarn 0' Shanter have 25 



44 BURNS 

been fondly named, in many of his other pieces ; nay, 
we incline to believe that this latter might have been 
written, all but quite as well, by a man who, in place 
of genius, had only possessed talent. 

5 Perhaps we may venture to say, that the most 
strictly poetical of all his ' poems ' is one which does 
not appear in Currie's Edition ; but has been often 
printed before and since, under the humble title of 
The Jolly Beggars. The subject truly is among the 

10 lowest in Nature; but it only the more shows our 
Poet's gift in raising it into the domain of Art. To 
our minds, this piece seems thoroughly compacted ; 
melted together, refined; and poured forth in one 
flood of true liquid harmony. It is light, airy, soft of 

15 movement; yet sharp and precise in its details ; every 
face is a portrait : that raucle carlin° that wee Apollo ° 
that Son of Mar 8° are Scottish, yet ideal ; the scene 
is at once a dream, and the very Eagcastle of ' Poosie- 
Nansie.' ° Farther, it seems in a considerable degree 

20 complete, a real self-supporting Whole, which is the 
highest merit in a poem. The blanket of the Night 
is drawn asunder for a moment; in full, ruddy, flam- 
ing light, these rough tatterdemalions are seen in 
their boisterous revel; for the strong pulse of Life 

25 vindicates its- right to gladness even here ; and when 



BURNS 



© 



the curtain closes, we prolong the action, without 
effort; the next clay as the last, our Caird° and our 
BcUladmonger are singing and soldiering; their ' brats 
and callets ' ° are hawking, begging, cheating ; and 
some other night, in new combinations, they will 5 
wring from Fate another hour of wassail and good 
cheer. Apart from the universal sympathy with 
man which this again bespeaks in Burns, a genuine 
inspiration and no inconsiderable technical talent are 
manifested here. There is the fidelity, humor, warm 10 
life, and accurate painting and grouping of some Ten- 
iers,° for whom hostlers and ca.rousing peasants are not 
without significance. It would be strange, doubtless, 
to call this the best of Burns's writings : we mean to 
say only, that it seems to us the most perfect of its 15 
kind, as a piece of poetical composition, strictly so 
called. In the Beggars' Opera, in the Beggars' 
P'i$h° as other critics have already remarked, there 
is nothing which, in real poetic vigor, equals this 
Cantata ; nothing, as we think, which comes within 20 
many degrees of it. 

1/ 

But by far the most finished, complete, and truly 
inspired pieces of Burns are, without dispute, to be 
found among his Songs. It is here that, although 



46 BURKS 

through a small aperture, his light shines with least 
obstruction ; in its highest beauty and pure sunny 
clearness. The reason may be, that Song is a brief 
simple species of composition; and requires nothing 

; so much for its perfection as genuine poetic feeling, 
genuine music of heart. Yet the Song has its rules 
equally with the Tragedy ; rules which in most cases 
are poorly fulfilled, in many cases are not so much as 
felt. We might write a long essay on the Songs of 

io Burns ; which we reckon by far the best that Britain 
has yet produced : for indeed, since the era of Queen 
Elizabeth, we know not that, by any other hand, aught 
truly worth attention has been accomplished in this 
department. True, we have songs enough 'by per- 

15 sons of quality'; we have tawdry, hollow, wine-bred 
madrigals ; many a rhymed speech ' in the flowing and 
watery vein of Ossorius the Portugal Bishop,' rich in 
sonorous words, and, for moral, dashed perhaps wi 1 
some tint of a sentimental sensuality ; all which many 

20 persons cease not from endeavoring to sing ; though 
for most part, we fear, the music is but from the 
throat outwards, or at best from some region far 
enough short of the Soul ; not in which, but in a 
certain inane Limbo of the Fancy, or even in some 

25 vaporous debatable-land on the outskirts of the Ner- 



BUBXS 47 

vous System, most of such madrigals and rhymed 
speeches seem to have originated. 

With ,tfee Songs of Burns we must not name these 
things, {independently of the clear, manly, heartfelt 
sentiment that ever pervades his poetry,Qiis Songs are 5 
honesj>in another point of view : in form, as well as 
in spirit. ) They do not affect to be set to music, but 
they actually and in themselves are music; they have 
received their life, and fashioned themselves together, 
in the medium of Harmony, as Venus rose from the 10 
bosom of the sea. The story, the feeling, is not 
detailed, but suggested ; not said, or spouted, in rhe- 
torical completeness and coherence ; but sung, in fitful 
gushes, in glowing hints, in fantastic breaks, in war- 
blings not of the voice only, but of the whole mind. 15 
(We consider this to be the essence of a song) and 
that no songs since the little careless catches, and as 
were drops of song, which Shakespeare has here and 
there sprinkled over his Plays, fulfil this condition 
in nearly the same degree as most of Burns's do. 20 
Such grace and truth of external movement, too, pre- 
supposes in general a corresponding force and truth 
of sentiment and inward meaning.'! The Songs of 
Burns are not more perfect in the former quality 
than in the latter. With what tenderness he sings, 25 



48 BURNS 

yet with what vehemence and entireness ! There is 
a piercing wail in his sorrow, the purest rapture in 
his joy; he burns with the sternest ire, or laughs 
with the loudest or sliest mirth ; and yet he is sweet 

5 and soft, ' sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, 
and soft as their parting tear.' If we farther take 
into account the immense variety of his subjects; 
how, from the loud flowing revel in Willie brew'd a 
Peck o' Maut, to the still, rapt enthusiasm of sadness 

iofor Mary in Heaven ; from the glad kind greeting of 
Auld Langsyne, or the comic archness of Duncan Gray, 
to the fire-eyed fury of Scots wlia liae wi y Wallace bled, 
he has found a tone and words for every mood of 
man's heart, -£- it will seem a small praise if we rank 

15 him as the first of all our Song-writersJ for we know 

not where to find one worthy of being second to him.! 

It is on his Songs, as we believe, that Burns's chief 

influence as an author will ultimately be found to 

depend^ nor, if our Fletcher's aphorism is true, shall 

20 we account this a small influence. ' Let me make the 
songs of a people,' said he, 'and you shall make its 
laws.' Surely, if ever any Poet might have equalled 
himself with Legislators on this ground, it was Burns. 
His Songs are already part of the mother-tongue, not 

25 of Scotland only but of Britain, and of the millions 



BURNS 49 

that in all ends of the earth speak a British language. 
In hut and hall, as the heart unfolds itself in many- 
colored joy and woe of existence, the name, the voice 
of that joy and that woe, is the name and voice which 
Burns has given them. QStrictly speaking, perhaps 5 
no British man has so deeply affected the thoughts 
and feelings of so many men, as this solitary and alto- 
gether private individual, with means apparently the 
humblest/ 

In another point of view, moreover, we incline to 10 
think that Burns's influence may have been consider- 
able : we mean, as exerted specially on the Literature 
of his country, at least on the Literature of Scotland. 
Among the great changes which British, particularly 
Scottish, literature has undergone since that period, 15 
one of the greatest will be found to consist in its 
remarkable increase of nationality} Even the English 
writers, most popular in Burns's time, were little dis- 
tinguished for their literary patriotism, in this its best 
sense. A certain attenuated cosmopolitanism had, in 20 
good measure, taken place of the old insular home- 
feeling ; literature was, as it were, without any local 
environment ; was not nourished by the affections 
which spring from a native soil. Our Grays and 
Glovers seemed to write almost as if in vacuo ; the 25 



50 BURNS 

thing written bears no mark of place ; it is not written 
so much for Englishmen, as for men ; or rather, which 
is the inevitable result of this, for certain Generali- 
zations which philosophy termed men. Goldsmith 
5 is an exception : not so Johnson ; the scene of his 
Rambler is little more English than that of his 
Hasselas. 

But if such was, in some degree, the case with Eng- 
land, it was, in the highest degree, the case with Scot- 

io land. In fact, our Scottish literature had, at that 
period, a very singular aspect ; unexampled, so far as 
we know, except perhaps at Geneva, where the same 
state of matters appears still to continue. Eor a long 
period after Scotland became British, we had no litera- 

15 ture: at the date when Addison and Steele were writing 
their Spectators, our good John Boston was writing, 
with the noblest intent, but alike in defiance of 
grammar and philosophy, his Fourfold State' of Man. 
Then came the schisms in our National Church, and 

20 the fiercer schisms in our Body "Politic: Theologic 
ink, and Jacobite blood, with gall enough in both 
cases, seemed to have blotted out the intellect of 
the country : however, it was only obscured, not 
obliterated. Lord Kamesi made nearly the first 

25 attempt at writing English ; and ere long, Hume, 



BURKS 51 

Robertson, Smith, and a whole host of followers, 
attracted hither the eyes of all Europe. And yet 
in this brilliant resuscitation of our 'fervid genius,' 
there was nothing truly Scottish, nothing indigenous ; 
except, perhaps, the natural impetuosity of intellect, 5 
which we sometimes claim, and are sometimes up- 
braided with, as a characteristic of our nation. It is 
curious to remark that Scotland, so full of writers, had 
no Scottish culture, nor indeed any English ; our cul- 
ture was almost exclusively French. It was by study- 10 
ing Racine and Voltaire, Batteux and Boileau, that 
Karnes had trained himself to be a critic and philoso- 
pher ; it was the light of Montesquieu and Mably° 
that guided Robertson in his political speculations ; 
Quesnay's lamp that kindled the lamp of Adam Smith. 15 
Hume was too rich a man to borrow ; and perhaps he 
reacted on the French more than he was acted on by 
them : but neither had he aught to do with Scotland ; 
Edinburgh, equally with La Fleche, was but the lodg- 
ing and laboratory, in which he not so much morally 20 
lived, as metaphysically investigated. Never, perhaps, 
was there a class of writers so clear and well-ordered, 
yet so totally destitute, to all appearance, of any patri- 
otic affection, nay, of any human affection whatever. 
The French wits of the period were as unpatriotic : 25 



52 BURNS 

but their general deficiency in moral principle, not to 
say their avowed sensuality and unbelief in all virtue, 
strictly so called, render this accountable enough. We 
hope, there is a patriotism founded on something better 

5 than prejudice; that our country may be dear to us, 
without injury to our philosophy ; that in loving and 
justly prizing all other lands, we may prize justly, and 
yet love before all others, our own stern Motherland, 
and the venerable Structure of social and moral Life, 

io which Mind has through long ages been building up 
for us there. Surely there is nourishment for the 
better part of man's heart in all this : surely the roots, 
that have fixed themselves in the very core of man's 
being, may be so cultivated as to grow up not into 

15 briers, but into roses, in the field of his life ! Our 
Scottish sages have no such propensities : the field of 
their life shows neither briers nor roses ; but only a 
flat, continuous thrashing-floor for Logic, whereon all 
questions, from the ' Doctrine of Rent ' to the ' Natural 

20 History of Religion,' are thrashed and sifted with the 
same mechanical impartiality ! 

With Sir AValter Scott at the head of our literature, 

",it cannot be denied that much of this evil is past, or 

rapidly passing away : our chief literary men, what- 

25 ever other faults they may have, no longer live among 



BURXS 53 

us like a French Colony, or some knot of Propaganda 
Missionaries ; but like natural-born subjects of the soil, 
partaking and sympathizing in all our attachments, 
humors and habits. Our literature no longer grows 
in water but iiiinoula, and with the true racy virtues 5 
of the soil and climate. How much of this change 
may be due to Burns, or to any other individual, it 
might be difficult to estimate. Direct literary imi- 
tation of Burns was not to be looked for. But his 
example, in the fearless adoption of domestic subjects, 10 
could not but operate from afar ; and certainly in no 
heart did the love of country ever burn with a warmer 
glow than in that of Burns : 'a tide of Scottish preju- 
dice/ as he modestly calls this deep and generous feel- 
ing, ' had been poured along his veins; and he felt that 15 
it would boil there till the flood-gates shut in eternal 
rest.' It seemed to him, as if he could do so little for 
his country, and yet would so gladly have done all. 
One small province stood open for him, — that of 
Scottish Song ; and how eagerly he entered on it, how 20 
devotedly he labored there ! In his toilsome journey- 
ings, this objects never quits him; it is the little happy- 
valley of his careworn heart. In the gloom of his own 
affliction, he eagerly searches after some lonely brother 
of the muse, and rejoices to snatch one other name 25 



54/ burns 

from the oblivion that was covering it ! These were 
early feelings, and they abode with him to the end : 

... A wish (I mind its power), 
A wish, that to my latest hour 
Will strongly heave my breast , — 
That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake, 
Some useful plan or book could make, 
Or sing a sang at least. 

The rough bur Thistle spreading wide 
io Amang the bearded bear, 

I turn'd my weeding-clips aside, 
\i And spared the symbol dear. 

But to leave the mere literary character of Burns, 
which has already detained us too long. Far more 

15 interesting than any of his written works, as it ap- 
pears to us, are his acted ones : the Life he willed and 
was fated to lead among his fellow-men. vThese Poems 
are but like little rhymed fragments scattered here and 
there in the grand un rhymed Romance of his earthly 

20 existence pand it is only when intercalated in this at 
their proper places, that they attain their full measure 
of significance. v And this too, alas, was but a fragment! | 
The plan of a mighty edifice had been sketched ; some 
columns, porticos, firm masses of building, stand com- 

25 pleted ; the rest more or less clearly indicated ; with 



BURNS 55 

many a far-stretching tendency, which only studious 
and friendly eyes can now trace towards the purposed 
termination. For the work is broken off in the middle, 
almost in the beginning ; and rises among us, beautiful 
and sad, at once unfinished and a ruin ! If charitable 5 
judgment was necessary in estimating his Poems, and 
justice required that the aim and the manifest power 
to fulfil it must often be accepted for the fulfilment ; 
much more is this the case in regard to his Life, the 
sum and result of all his endeavors, where his difn- 10 
culties came upon him not in detail only, but in mass ; 
and so much has been left unaccomplished, nay, was 
mistaken, and altogether marred. 
C^Properly speaking, there is but one era in the life of 
Burns, and that the earliest. We have not youth and 15 
manhood, but only youth : for, to the end, we discern 
no decisive change in the complexion of his character ; 
in his thirty-seventh year, he is still, as it were, in 
youth. With all that resoluteness of judgment, that 
penetrating insight, and singular maturity of intellec- 20 
tual power, exhibited in his writings, lie never attains 
to any clearness regarding himseli ; to the last, he 
never ascertains his peculiar aim,° even with such 
distinctness as is common among ordinary men ; and 
therefore never can pursue it with that singleness of 25 



56 BURNS 

will, which insures success and some contentment to 
such men. /To the last, he wavers between two pur- 
poses : glorying in his talent, like a true poet, he yet 
cannot consent to make this his chief and sole glory, 
5 and to follow it as the one thing needful, through pov- 
erty or riches, through good or evil report} Another 
far meaner ambition still cleaves to him ; he must 
dream and struggle about a certain ' Eock of Indepen- 
dence ' ; which, natural and even admirable as it might 

io be, was still but a warring with the world, on the com- 
paratively insignificant ground of his being more com- 
pletely or less completely supplied with money than 
others ; of his standing at a higher or at a lower alti- 
tude in general estimation than others. For the world 

15 still appears to him, as to the young, in borrowed col- 
ors : he expects from it what it cannot give to any 
man ; seeks for contentment, not within himself, in 
action and wise effort, but from without, in the kind- 
ness of circumstances, in love, friendship, honor, pecun- 

2oiary ease. He would be happy, not actively and in 
himself, but passively and from some ideal cornuco- 
pia of Enjoyments, not earned by his own labor, but 
showered on him by the beneficence of Destiny. Thus, 
like a young man, he cannot gird himself up for any 

25 worthy well-calculated goal, but swerves to and fro, 



BURNS 57 

between passionate hope and remorseful disappoint- 
ment : rushing onwards with a deep tempestuous force, 
he surmounts or breaks asunder many a barrier ; trav- 
els, nay, advances far, but advancing only under uncer- 
tain guidance, is ever and anon turned from his path ; 5 
and to the last cannot reach the /on ly true h appinesjL. 
of a maivthat of_clear decidedAcJ^iyityJju^ — 

for which, by nature and circu nis tances, Jie__IiR« Vigp-n 

fitteci ahdTappointed. ) 

We do not say these things in dispraise of Burns ; 10 
nay, perhaps, they but interest us the more in his 
favor. This blessing is not given soonest to the best ; 
but rather, it is often the greatest minds that are 
latest in obtaining it ; for where most is to be devel- 
oped, most time may be required to develop it. A 15 
complex condition had been assigned him from with- 
out ; as complex a condition from within : no i pre- 
established harmony ' existed between the clay soil of 
Mossgiel and the empyrean soul of Robert Burns ; it 
was not wonderful that the adjustment between them 20 
should have been long postponed, and his arm long 
cumbered, and his sight confused, in so vast and dis- 
cordant an economy as he had been appointed steward 
over. Byron was, at his death, but a year younger 
than Burns ; and through life, as it might have ap- 25 



58 BURNS 

peared, far more simply situated : yet in him too we 
can trace no such adjustment, no such moral man- 
hood ; but at best, and only a little before his end, 
the beginning of what seemed such. 
5 Q3y much the most striking incident in Burns's Life 
is his journey to EdinburglijCbut perhaps a still more 
important one is his residence at Irvine) so early as 
in his twenty-third year. (Hitherto his life had been 
poor and toil worn ; but otherwise not ungenial, and, 

io with all its' distresses, by no means unhappy) In his 
parentage, deducting outward circumstances, he had 
every reason to reckon himself fortunate. His father 
was a man of thoughtful, intense, earnest character, 
as the best of our peasants are ; valuing knowledge, 

15 possessing some, and, what is far better and rarer, 
open-minded for more : a man with a keen insight 
and devout heart; reverent towards God, friendly 
therefore at once, and fearless towards all that God 
has made : in one word, though but a hard-handed 

20 peasant, a complete and fully unfolded Man. Such 
a father is seldom found in any rank in society ; and 
was worth descending far in society to seek. (Unfor- 
tunately, he was very poor ; had he been even a little 
richer, almost never so little, the whole might have 

25 issued far otherwise./ Mighty events turn on a straw ; 



BURNS 



65 



the crossing of a brook decides the conquest of the 
world. fHacl this William Burns's small seven acres 
of nursery -ground anywise prospered, the boy Robert 
had been sent to school ; had struggled forward, as so 
many weaker men do, to some university ; come forth 5 
not as a rustic wonder, but as a regular well-trained 
intellectual workman, and changed the whole course 
of British Literature^)— f or it lay in him to have 
done this ! But the nursery did not prosper ; pov- 
erty sank his whole family below the help of even 10 
our cheap school-system : Burns remained a hard- 
worked ploughboy, and British literature took its 
own course. Nevertheless, even in this rugged scene 
there is much to nourish him. If he drudges, it is 
with his brother, and for his father and mother, whom 15 
he loves, and would fain shield from want. Wisdoi 
is not banished from their poor hearth, nor the bah 11 
of natural feeling: the solemn words, Let us worship 
God, are heard there from a ' priest-like father ' ° : if 
threatenings of unjust men throw mother and chil-20 
dren into tears, these are tears not of grief only, but 
of holiest affection ; every heart in that humble group 
feels itself the closer knit to every other ; in their 
hard warfare they are there together, a k ' little band 
of brethren.' Neither are such tears, and the deep 25 



60 BURXS 

beauty that dwells in them, their only portion. Light 
visits the hearts as it does the eyes of all living: there 
is a force, too, in this youth, that enables him to tram- 
ple on misfortune ; nay, to bind it under his feet to 
5 make him sport. For a bold, warm, buoyant humor 
of character has been given him; and so the thick- 
coming shapes of evil are welcomed with a gay, 
friendly irony, and in their closest pressure he bates 
no jot of heart or hope. Vague yearnings of ambi- 
io tion fail not, as he grows up ; dreamy fancies hang 
like cloud-cities around him ; the curtain of Existence 
is slowly rising, in many-colored splendor and gloom : 
and the auroral light of first love is gilding his horizon, 
and the music of song is on his path ; and. so he walks 

15 in glory and in joy,° 

Behind his plough, upon the mountain side. 

C We ourselves know, from the best evidence, that 
up to this date Burns was happy ; nay, that he was 
the gayest, brightest, most fantastic, fascinating being 
20 to be found in the world; more so even than he ever 
afterwards appeared.} But now, at this early age, he 
quits the paternal roof; goes forth into looser, louder, 
more exciting society ; and becomes initiated in those 
dissipations, those vices, which a certain class of phi' 



BURNS 61 

losopliers have asserted to be a natural preparation 
for entering on active life; a kind of mud-bath, in 
which the youth is, as it were, necessitated to steep, 
and, we suppose, cleanse himself, before the real toga 
of Manhood can be laid on him. We shall not dis-5 
pute much with this class of philosophers ; we hope 
they are mistaken : for Sin and Kemorse so easily 
beset us at all stages of life, and are always such 
indifferent company, that it seems hard we should, at 
any stage, be forced and fated not only to meet but 10 
to yield to them, and even serve for a term in their 
leprous armada. We hope it is not so. Clear we are, 
at all events, it cannot be the training one receives 
in this Devil's-service, but only our determining to 
desert from it, that fits us for true n^kly Action. 15 
We become men, not after we have been dissipated, 
and disappointed in the chase of false pleasure; but 
after we have ascertained, in any way, what impas- 
sable barriers hem us in through this life^ how mad 
it is to hope for contentment to our infinite soul 20 
from the gifts of this extremely finite world ; that a 
man must be sufficient for himself ; and that for suf- 
fering and enduring there is no remedy but striving 
and doing, fl Manhood begins when we have in any 
way made truce with Necessity ; / begins even when 25 



62 BURNS 

we have surrendered to Necessity, as the most part 
only do ; but begins joyfully and hopefully only when 
we have reconciled ourselves to Necessity ; and thus, 
in reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in Neces- 
5 sity we are freeTj Surely, such lessons as this last, 
which, in one shape or other, is the grand lesson for 
every mortal man, are better learned from the lips of 
a devout mother, in the looks and actions of a devout, 
father, while the heart is yet soft and pliant, than in 

10 collision with the sharp adamant of Fate, attracting 
us to shipwreck us, when the heart is grown hard, 
and may be broken before it will become contrite. 
Had Burns continued to learn this, as he was already 
learning it, in his father's cottage, he would have 

15 learned it fully, which he never did, and been saved 
many a lasting aberration, many a bitter hour and 
year of remorseful sorrow. 

Tit seems to us another circumstance of fatal import in 
Burns's history, that at this time too he became involved 

20 in the religious quarrels of his district^ that he was 
enlisted and feasted, as the fighting man of the New- 
Light Priesthood, in their highly unprofitable warfare. 
At the tables of these free-minded clergy he learned 
much more than was needful for him. Such liberal 

25 ridicule of fanaticism awakened in his mind scruples 



BURNS 63 

about Religion itself ; and a whole world of Doubts, 
which it required quite another set of conjurers than 
these men to exorcise. We do not say that such an 
intellect as his could have escaped similar doubts at 
some period of his history ; or even that he could, at 5 
a later period, have come through them altogether 
victorious and unharmed : but it seems peculiarly 
unfortunate that this time, above all others, should have 
been fixed for the encounter. For now, with princi- 
ples assailed by evil example from without, by ' pas- 10 
sions raging like demons ' ° from within, he had little 
need of sceptical misgivings to whisper treason in the 
heat of the battle, or to cut off his retreat if he were 
already defeated. He loses his feeling of innocence ; 
his mind is at variance with itself; the old divinity 15 
no longer presides there; but wild Desires and wild 
Repentance alternately oppress him. Ere long, too, 
he has committed himself before the world £his char- 
acter for sobriety, dear to a Scottish peasant as few 
corrupted worldlings can even conceive, is destroyed 20 
in the eyes of men) and his only refuge consists in 
trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, and is but a refuge 
of lies. The blackest desperation now gathers over 
him, broken only by red lightnings of remorse. The 
whole fabric of his life is blasted asunder ; for now 25 



64 BURNS 

not only his character, but his personal liberty, is to 
be lost ; men and Fortune are leagued for his hurt ; 
'hungry Ruin has him in the wind.' He sees no 
escape but the saddest of all : exile from his loved 
5 country, to a country in every sense inhospitable and 
abhorrent to him. While the l gloomy night is gath- 
ering fast,' ° in mental storm and solitude, as well as 
in physical, he sings his wild farewell to Scotland : 

Farewell, my friends ; farewell, my foes ! 
10 My peace with these, my love with those : 

The bursting tears my heart declare ; 
Adieu, my native banks of Ayr ! 

Light breaks suddenly in on him in floods ; but still 
a false transitory light, and no real sunshine. He is 

15 invited to Edinburgh ; hastens thither with anticipat- 
ing heart; is welcomed as in a triumph, and with 
universal blandishment and acclamation ; whatever 
is wisest, whatever is greatest or loveliest there, 
gathers round him, to gaze on his face, to show him 

20 honor, sympathy, affection. Burns' s appearance among 
the sages and nobles of Edinburgh must be regarded 
as one of the most singular phenomena in modern Lit- 
erature ; almost like the appearance of some Napoleon 
among the crowned sovereigns of modern Politics. For 



BUMWS G5 

it is nowise as a < mockery king/ set there by favor, 
transiently and for a purpose, that he will let him- 
self be treated ; still less is he a mad Rienzi, whose 
sudden elevation turns his too weak head: but he 
stands there on his own basis; cool, unastonished, 5 
holding his equal rank from Nature herself ; putting 
forth no claim which there is not strength hi him, as 
Well as about him, to vindicate. Mr. Lockhart has 
some forcible observations on this point : 

' It needs no effort of imagination,' says he, 'to con- 10 
ceive what the sensations of an isolated set of scholars 
(almost all either clergymen or professors) must have 
been in the presence of this big-boned, black-browed, 
brawny stranger, with his great flashing eyes, who, 
having forced his way among them from the plough- 15 
tail at a single stride, manifested in the whole strain 
of his bearing and conversation a most thorough con- 
viction, that in the society of the most eminent men 
of his nation he was exactly where he was entitled to 
be ; hardly deigned to flatter them by exhibiting even 20 
an occasional symptom of being flattered by their 
notice; by turns calmly measured himself against 
the most cultivated understandings of his time in 
discussion; overpowered the bon-mots of the most 



66 BURNS 

- celebrated convivialists by broad floods of merri- 
ment, impregnated with all the burning life of genins : 
astounded bosoms habitually enveloped in the thrice 
piled folds of social reserve, by compelling them tci 
5 tremble, — nay, to tremble visibly, — beneath th^. 
fearless touch of natural pathos ; and all this withoiyi 
indicating the smallest willingness to be ranked among 
those professional ministers of excitement, who are coil- 
tent to be paid in money and smiles for doing wha;t 

10 the spectators and auditors would be ashamed of doing 
in their own persons, even if they had the power of 
doing it; and last, and probably worst of all, who 
was known to be in the habit of enlivening societies 
which they would have scorned to approach, still more 

15 frequently than their own, with eloquence no less mag- 
nificent ; with wit, in all likelihood still more daring ; 
often enough, as the superiors whom he fronted with- 
out alarm might have guessed from the beginning, 
and had ere long no occasion to guess, with wit pointed 

20 at themselves.' 

The farther we remove from this scene, the more 
singular will it seem to us : details of the exterior 
aspect of it are already full of interest. Most readers 
recollect Mr. Walker's personal interviews with Burns 



BURNS 67 

as among the best passages of his Narrative : a time 
will come when this reminiscence of Sir Walter Scott's, 
slight though it is, will also be precious : 

1 As for Burns/ writes Sir Walter, ' I may truly 
say, Virgilium vidi tantum.° I was a lad of fifteen in 5 
1786-7, when he came first to Edinburgh, but had 
sense and feeling enough to be much interested in his 
poetry, and would have given the world to know him : 
but I had very little acquaintance with any literary 
people, and still less with the gentry of the west 10 
country ; the two sets that he most frequented. Mr. 
Thomas Grierson was at that time a clerk of my 
father's. He knew Burns, and promised to ask him 
to his lodgings to dinner ; but had no opportunity to 
keep his word ; otherwise I might have seen more of 15 
this distinguished man. As it was, I saw him one day 
at the late venerable Professor Ferguson's, where there 
were several gentlemen of literary reputation, among 
whom I remember the celebrated Mr. Dugald Stewart. 
Of course, we youngsters sat silent, looked, and lis- 20 
tened. The only thing I remember which was remark- 
able in Burns's manner, was the effect produced upon 
him by a print of Bunbury's, representing a soldier 
lying dead on the snow, his dog sitting in misery on 



68 BUKXS 

one side, — on the other, his widow, with a child in 
her arms. These lines were written beneath : 

" Cold on Canadian hills, or Minderfs plain, 
Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain ; 
5 Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew, — 

The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, 
Gave the sad presage of his future years, 
The child of misery, baptized in tears.'" 

' Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather 

io by the ideas which it suggested to his mind. He actu- 
ally shed tears. He asked whose the lines were ; and 
it chanced that nobody but myself remembered that 
they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne's 
called by the unpromising title of " The Justice of 

15 Peace." I whispered my information to a friend pres- 
ent ; he mentioned it to Burns, who rewarded me with a 
look and a word, which, though of mere civility, I then 
received and still recollect with very great pleasure. 
' His person was strong and robust ; his manners rus- 

20 tic, not clownish ; a sort of dignified plainness and sim- 
plicity, which received part of its effect perhaps from 
one's knowledge of his extraordinary talents. His 
features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth's picture: 
but to me it conveys the idea that they are dimin- 

25 ished, as if seen in perspective. I think his counte- 



BURNS 69 

nance was more massive than it looks in any of the 
portraits. I should have taken the poet, had I not 
known what he was, for a very sagacious country 
farmer of the old Scotch school, i.e., none of your 
modern agriculturists who kept laborers for theirs 
drudgery, but the douce gudeman who held his own 
plough. There was a strong expression of sense and 
shrewdness in all his lineaments ; the eye alone, I 
think, indicated the poetical character and tempera- 
ment. It was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed 10 
(I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or 
interest. I never saw such another eye in a human 
head, though I have seen the most distinguished men 
of my time. His conversation expressed perfect self- 
confidence, without the slightest presumption. Among 15 
the men who were the most learned of their time and 
country, he expressed himself with perfect firmness, 
but without the least intrusive forwardness ; and when 
he differed in opinion, he did not hesitate to express 
it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty. I do 20 
not remember any part of his conversation distinctly 
enough to be quoted ; nor did I ever see him again, 
except in the street, where he did not recognize me, as 
I could not expect he should. He was much caressed 
in Edinburgh : but (considering what literary emolu- 25 



70 BURWS 

ments have been since his day) the efforts made for 
his relief were extremely trifling. 

' I remember, on this occasion I mention, I thought 
Burns's acquaintance with English poetry was rather 

5 limited ; and also that, having twenty times the abili- 
ties of Allan Ramsay and of Ferguson, he talked of 
them with too much humility as his models : there 
was doubtless national predilection in his estimate. 
' This is all I can tell you about Burns. I have only 

10 to add, that his dress corresponded with his manner. 
He was like a farmer dressed in his best to dine with 
the laird. I do not speak in mcdam partem, when I 
say, I never saw a man in company with his superiors 
in station or information more perfectly free from 

15 either the reality or the affectation of embarrassment. 
I was told, but did not observe it, that his address to 
females was extremely deferential, and always with a 
turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which en- 
gaged their attention particularly. I have heard the 

20 late Duchess of Gordon remark this. — I do not know 
anything I can add to these recollections of forty years 
since.' 

The conduct of Burns under this dazzling blaze of 
favor ; the calm, unaffected, manly manner in which 



BURNS 71 

he not only bore it, but estimated its value, has justly 
been regarded as the best proof that could be given of 
his real vigor and integrity of mind. A little natural 
vanity, some touches of hypocritical modesty, some 
glimmerings of affectation, at least some fear of being 5 
thought affected, we could have pardoned in almost 
any man ; but no such indication is to be traced here. 
In his unexampled situation the young peasant is not 
a moment perplexed ; so many strange lights do not 
confuse him, do not lead him astray; Nevertheless, 10 
we cannot but perceive that this winter did him great 
and lasting injury. A somewhat clearer knowledge of 
men's affairs, scarcely of their characters, it did afford 
him ; but a sharper feeling of Fortune's unequal ar- 
rangements in their social destiny it also left with 15 
him. He had seen the gay and gorgeous arena, in 
which the powerful are born to play their parts ; nay, 
had himself stood in the midst of it; %nd he felt more 
bitterly than ever, that here he was but a looker-on, 
and had no part or lot in that splendid game. From 20 
this time a jealous indignant fear of social degradation 
takes possession of him ; and perverts, so far as aught 
could pervert, his private contentment, and his feelings 
towards his richer fellows. It was clear to Burns that 
he had talent enough to make a fortune, or a hundred 25 



72 BURNS 

fortunes, could he but have rightly willed this ; it was 
clear also that he willed something far different, and 
therefore could not make one. Unhappy it was that 
he had not power to choose the one, and reject the 

, 5 other ; but must halt forever between two opinions, 
two objects ; making hampered advancement towards 
either. But so is it with many men : Ave '' long for 
the merchandise, yet would fain keep the price); and 
so stand chaffering with Fate, in vexatious altercation, 

10 till the night come, and our fair is over ! 

The Edinburgh Learned of that period were in gen- 
eral more noted for clearness of head than for warmth 
of heart : with the exception of the good old Black- 
lock, whose help w^as too ineffectual, scarcely one 

15 among them seems to have looked at Burns with any 
true sympathy, or indeed much otherwise than as at 
a highly curious thing. By the great also he is treated 
in the customary fashion ; entertained at their tables 
and dismissed: certain modica of pudding and praise 

20 are, from time to time, gladly exchanged for the fas- 
cination of his presence ; which exchange once effected, 
the bargain is finished, and each party goes his sev- 
eral way. At the end of this strange season, Burns 
gloomily sums up his gains and losses, and meditates 

25 on the chaotic future. In money he is somewhat 



BURJSTS 73 

richer ; in fame and the show of happiness, infinitely 
richer ; but in the substance of it, as poor as ever. 
Nay, poorer; for his heart is now maddened still 
more with the fever of worldly Ambition ; and 
through long years the disease will rack him with 5 
unprofitable sufferings, and weaken his strength for 
all true and nobler aims. / 

What Burns was next to do or to avoid; how a 
man so circumstanced was now to guide himself 
towards his true advantage, might at this point of 10 
time have been a question for the wisest. It was a 
question too, which apparently he was left altogether 
to answer for himself : of his learned or rich patrons 
it had not struck any individual to turn a thought on 
this so trivial matter. Without claiming for Burns 15 
the praise of perfect sagacity, we must say, that his 
Excise and Farm scheme does not seem to us a very 
unreasonable one ; that we should be at a loss, even 
now, to suggest one decidedly better. Certain of his 
admirers have felt scandalized at his ever resolving to 20 
gauge ; and would have had him lie at the pool, till 
the spirit of Patronage stirred the waters, that so, 
with one friendly plunge, all his sorrows might be 
healed. Unwise counsellors ! They know not the 
manner of this spirit; and how, in the lap of most 25 



74 BURNS 

golden dreams, a man might have happiness, were it 
not that in the interim he must die of hunger ! It 
reflects credit on the manliness and sound sense of 
Burns, that he felt so early on what ground he was 

5 standing ; and preferred self-help, on the humblest 
scale, to dependence and inaction, though with hope 
of far more splendid possibilities. But even these 
possibilities were not rejected in his scheme : he 
might expect, if it chanced that he had any friend, to 

io rise, in no long period, into something even like opu- 
lence and leisure ; while again, if it chanced that he 
had no friend, he could still live in security ; and for 
the rest, he ' did not intend to borrow honor from any 
profession.' We think, then, that his plan was hon- 

15 est and well-calculated : all turned on the execution 
of it. Doubtless it failed; yet not, we believe, from 
any vice inherent in itself. Nay, after all, it was no 
failure of external means, but of internal, that over- 
took Burns. His was no bankruptcy of the purse, 

20 but of the soul; to his last day, he owed no man 
anything. 

Meanwhile he begins well : with two good and wise 
actions. His donation to his mother, munificent from 
a man whose income had lately been seven pounds 

25 a-year, was worthy of him, and not more than worthy. 



BURNS 75 

Generous also, and worthy of him, was his treatment 
of the woman whose life's welfare now depended on 
his pleasure. A friendly observer might have hoped 
serene days for him : his mind is on the true road to 
peace with itself : what clearness he still wants will 5 
be given as he proceeds ; for the best teacher of duties 
that still lie dim to us, is the Practice of those we see 
and have at hand. Had the ' patrons of genius,' who 
could give him nothing, but taken nothing from him, 
at least nothing more ! The wounds of his heart i 
would have healed, vulgar ambition would have died 
away. Toil and Frugality would have been welcome, 
since Virtue dwelt with them ; and Poetry would 
have shone through them as of old : and in her clear 
ethereal light, which was his own by birthright, he 15 
might have looked down on his earthly destiny and 
all its obstructions, not with patience only, but with 
love. 

But the patrons of genius would not have it so. 
Picturesque tourists, 1 all manner of fashionable dan- 20 

1 There is one little sketch by certain ' English gentlemen ' 
of this class, which, though adopted in Currie's Narrative, and 
since then repeated in most others, we have all along felt an 
invincible disposition to regard as imaginary : ' On a rock that 
projected into the stream, they saw a man employed in angling, 25 



76 BURNS 

glers after literature, and, far worse, all manner of 
convivial Maecenases, hovered round him in his 
retreat ; and his good as well as his weak qualities 
secured them influence over him. He was flattered 
5 by their notice ; and his warm social nature made it 
impossible for him to shake them off, and hold on his 
way apart from them. These men, as we believe, 
were proximately the means of his ruin. Not that 
they meant him any ill ; they only meant themselves 
io a little good; if he suffered harm, let Mm look to it! 
But they wasted his precious time and his precious 
talent; they disturbed his composure, broke down 
his returning habits of temperance and assiduous 
contented exertion. Their pampering was baneful 

15 of a singular appearance. He had a cap made of fox skin on 

his head, a loose greatcoat fixed round him by a belt, from 

which depended an enormous Highland broad-sword. It was 

Burns.' Now, we rather think, it was not Burns. For, to say 

■nothing of the fox skin cap, the loose and quite Hiberniar 

20 watchcoat with the belt, what are we to make of this ' enor- 
mous Highland broadsword ' depending from him ? More 
especially, as there is no word of parish constables on the look- 
out to see whether, as Dennis phrases it, he had an eye to his 
own midriff or that of the public ! Burns, of all men, had the 

2 5 least need, and the least tendency, to seek for distinction, either 
in his own eyes, or those of others, by such poor mummeries. 






BURXS 77 

to him ; their cruelty, which soon followed, was 
equally baneful. 'The old grudge against Fortune's 
inequality awoke with new bitterness in their neigh- 
borhood ; and Burns had no retreat but to * the Rock 
of Independence,' which is but an air-castle after all, 5 
that looks well at a distance, but will screen no one 
from real wind and wet. Flushed with irregular 
excitement, exasperated alternately by contempt of 
others, and contempt of himself, Burns was no longer 
regaining his peace of mind, but fast losing it forever. 10 
There was a hollowness at the heart of his life, for 
his conscience did not now approve what he was doing. 
Amid the vapors of unwise enjoyment, of bootless 
remorse, and angry discontent with Fate, his true 
loadstar, a life of Poetry, with Poverty, nay, with 15 
Famine if it must be so, was too often altogether hid- 
den from his eyes. And yet he sailed a sea, where 
without some such loadstar there was no right steering. 
Meteors of French Politics rise before him, but these 
were not his stars. An accident this, which hastened, 20 
but did not originate, his worst distresses. In the 
mad contentions of that time, he comes in collision 
with certain official Superiors ; is wounded by them ; 
cruelly lacerated, we should say, could a dead 
mechanical implement, in any case, be called cruel : 25 



78 BURNS 

and shrinks, in indignant pain, into deeper self-seclu- 
sion, into gloomier moodiness than ever. His life has 
now lost its unity : it is a life of fragments ; led with 
little aim, beyond the melancholy one of securing its 
5 own continuance, — in fits of wild false joy when 
such offered, and of black despondency when they 
passed away. His character before the world begins 
to suffer : calumny is busy with him ; for a miserable 
man makes more enemies than friends. Some faults 

io he has fallen into, and a thousand misfortunes ; but 
deep criminality is what he stands accused of, and 
they that are not without sin cast the first stone at 
him! For is he not a well-wisher to the French 
Revolution, a Jacobin, and therefore in that one act 

15 guilty of all ? These accusations, political and moral, 
it has since appeared, were false enough : but the 
world hesitated little to credit them. Nay, his con- 
vivial Maecenases- themselves were not the last to do 
it. There is reason to believe that, in his later years, 

20 the Dumfries Aristocracy had partly withdrawn them- 
selves from Burns, as from a tainted person no longer 
worthy of their acquaintance. That painful class, 
stationed, in all provincial cities, behind the outmost 
breastwork of Gentility, there to stand siege and do 

25 battle against the intrusions of Grocerdom and Gra- 



BURXS 79 

zierdom, had actually seen dishonor in the society 
of Burns, and branded him with their veto ; had, as 
we vulgarly say, cut him ! We find one passage in 
this Work of Mr. Lockhart's, which will not out of 
our thoughts : 5 

( A gentleman of that county, whose name I have 
already more than once had occasion to refer to, has 
often told me that he was seldom more grieved than 
when, riding into Dumfries one fine summer evening 
about this time to attend a county ball, he saw Burns 10 
walking alone, on the shady side of the principal 
street of the town, while the opposite side was gay 
with successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all 
drawn together for the festivities of the night, not 
one of whom appeared willing to recognize him. The 15 
horseman dismounted, and joined Burns > who on his 
proposing to cross the street said : " Nay, nay, my 
young friend, that's all over now " ; and quoted, after 
a pause, some verses of Lady Grizzel Baillie's pathetic 
ballad : 20 

" His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on bis brow, 
His auld ane lookM better than mony ane's new ; 
But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing, 
And casts himsel dowie upon the corn-bing.° 



80 BURNS 

" 0, were we young as we ance hae been, 
We sulci hae been galloping down on yon green, 
And linking it ower the lily-white lea ! 
And werena my heart light, I wad die. 1 '' 






5 It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on 
certain subjects escape in this fashion. He, immedi- 
ately after reciting these verses, assumed the spright- 
liness of his most pleasing manner ; and taking his 
young friend home with him, entertained him very 

io agreeably till the hour of the ball arrived.' 

Alas ! when we think that Burns now sleeps * where 
bitter indignation can no longer lacerate his heart,' ! 
and that most of those fair dames and frizzled gentle- 
men already lie at his side, where the breastwork of 

i 5 gentility is quite thrown down, — who would not sigh 
over the thin delusions and foolish toys that divide 
heart from heart, and make man unmerciful to his 
brother ! 

It was not now to be hoped that the genius of 

20 Burns would ever reach maturity, or accomplish aught 
worthy of itself. His spirit was jarred in its melody; 
not the soft breath of natural feeling, but the rude 

1 UM sceva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. Swift's 
Epitaph. 



BURNS 81 

hand of Fate, was now sweeping over the strings. 
And yet what harmony was in him, what music even 
in his discords ! How the wild tones had a charm for 
the simplest and the wisest ; and all men felt and 
knew that here also was one of the Gifted ! ' If he 5 
entered an inn at midnight, after all the inmates were 
in bed, the news of his arrival circulated from the 
cellar to the garret ; and ere ten minutes had elapsed, 
the landlord and all his guests were assembled ! ' 
Some brief pure moments of poetic life were yet 10 
appointed him, in the composition of his Songs. We 
can understand how he grasped at this employment ; 
and how too, he spurned all other reward for it but 
what the labor itself brought him. For the soul of 
Burns, though scathed and marred, was yet living in 15 
its full moral strength, though sharply conscious of 
its errors and abasement : and here, in his destitution 
and degradation, was one act of seeming nobleness 
and self-devotedness left even for him to perform. 
He felt too, that with all the ' thoughtless follies ' 20 
that had ' laid him low/ the world was unjust and 
cruel to him ; and he silently appealed to another and 
calmer time. Not as a hired soldier, but as a patriot, 
would he strive for the glory of his country: so he 
cast from him the poor sixpence a-day, and served 25 

G 



82 BURXS 

zealously as a volunteer. Let us not grudge him this 
last luxury of his existence; let him not have appeale 1 
to us in vain ! The money was not necessary to him . 
he struggled through without it : long since, thes^r 

5 guineas would have been gone ; and now the higl - 
mindedness of refusing them will plead for him in 
all hearts forever. 

AVe are here arrived at the crisis of Burns's life ; fc 
matters had now taken such a shape with him as could 

io not long continue. If improvement was not to be 
looked for, Nature could only for a limited time main- 
tain this dark and maddening warfare against the 
world and itself. We are not medically informed 
whether any continuance of years was, at this period, 

15 probable for Burns ; whether his death is to be looked 
on as in some sense an accidental event, or only as the 
natural consequence of the long series of events that 
had preceded. The latter seems to be the likelier 
opinion ; and yet it is by no means a certain one. At 

20 all events, as we have said, some change could not be 
very distant. \Xhree gates of deliverance, it seems to 
us, were open for Burns : clear poetical activity ; mad- 
ness ; or death. The first, with longer life, was still 
possible, though not probable ; for physical causes 

25 were beginning to be concerned in it : and yet Burns 



Bunirs 83 

had an iron resolution ; could he bnt have seen and 
felt, that not only his highest glory, bnt his first duty, 
and the true medicine for all his woes, lay here. The 
second was still less probable ; for his mind was ever 
among the clearest and firmest. So the milder third 5 
gate was opened for him : and he passed, not softly, 
yet speedily, into that still country, where the hail- 
storms and fire-showers do not reach, and the heaviest- 
laden wayfarer at length lays down his load ! 

Contemplating this sad end of Burns, and how he 10 
sank unaided by any real help, uncheered by any wise 
sympathy, generous minds have sometimes figured to 
themselves, with a reproachful sorrow, that much might 
have been done for him ; that by counsel, true affec- 
tion, and friendly ministrations, he might have been 15 
saved to himself and the world. We question whether 
there is not more tenderness of heart than soundness 
of judgment in these suggestions. It seems dubious 
to us whether the richest, wisest, most benevolent 
individual could have lent Burns any effectual help. 20 
Counsel, which seldom profits any one, he did not 
need ; in his understanding, he knew the right from 
the wrong, as well perhaps as any man ever did ; but 
the persuasion which would have availed him, lies not 



84 BURNS 

so much in the head as in the heart, where no argu- 
ment or expostulation could have assisted much to 
implant it. As to money again, we do not believe 
that this was his essential want ; or well see how any 

5 private man could, even presupposing Burns's consent, 
have bestowed on him an independent fortune, with 
much prospect of decisive advantage. It is a mortify- 
ing truth, that two men in any rank of society could 
hardly be found virtuous enough to give money, and 

ioto take it as a necessary gift, without injury to the 
moral entireness of one or both. But so stands the 
fact: Friendship, in the old heroic sense of that term, 
no longer exists ; except in the cases of kindred or 
other legal affinity, it is in reality no longer expected, or 

15 recognized as a virtue among men. A close observer 
of manners has pronounced 'Patronage,' that is, pe- 
cuniary or other economic furtherance, to be 'twice 
cursed ' ; ° cursing him that gives, and him that takes ! 
And thus, in regard to outward matters also, it has 

20 become the rule, as in regard to inward it always 
was and must be the rule, that no one shall look for 
effectual help to another ; but that each shall rest con- 
tented with what help he can afford himself. Such, 
we say, is the principle of modern Honor ; naturally 

25 enough growing out of that sentiment of Pride, which 



BURNS 85 

we inculcate and encourage as the basis of our whole 
social morality. Many a poet has been poorer than 
Burns; but no one was ever prouder: we may ques- 
tion whether, without great precautions, even a pension 
from Royalty would not have galled and encumbered, 5 
more than actually assisted him. 

Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with 
another class of Burns's admirers, who accuse the 
higher ranks among us of having ruined Burns by 
their selfish neglect of him. We have already stated 10 
our doubts whether direct pecuniary help, had it been 
offered, would have been accepted, or could have proved 
very effectual. We shall readily admit, however, that 
much was to be done for Burns ; that many a poisoned 
arrow might have been warded from his bosom ; many 15 
an entanglement in his path cut asunder by the hand 
of the powerful ; and light and heat, shed on him from 
high places, would have made his humble atmosphere 
more genial ; and the softest heart then breathing 
might have lived and died with some fewer pangs. 20 
Nay, we shall grant farther, and for Burns it is grant- 
ing much, that, with all his pride, he would have 
thanked, even with exaggerated gratitude, any one 
who had cordially befriended him : patronage, unless 
once cursed, needed not to have been twice so. At 25 



86 BURNS 

all events, the poor promotion he desired in his call- 
ing might have been granted : it was his own scheme, 
therefore likelier than any other to be of service. All 
this it might have been a luxury, nay, it was a duty, 
5 for our nobility to have done. No part of all this, 
however, did any of them do ; or apparently attempt, 
or wish to do : so much is granted against them. But 
what then is the amount of their blame ? Simply that 
they were men of the world, and walked by the prin- 

io ciples of such men ; that they treated Burns, as other 
nobles and other commoners had done other poets ; as 
the English did Shakespeare ; as King Charles and his 
Cavaliers did Butler, as King Philip and his Grandees 
did Cervantes. Do men gather grapes of thorns ; or 

15 shall we cut down our thorns for yielding only a fence 
and haws ? How, indeed, could the ' nobility and gen- 
try of his native land ' hold out any help to this ' Scot- 
tish Bard, proud of his name and country ' ? Were 
the nobility and gentry so much as able rightly to 

20 help themselves ? Had they not their game to pre- 
serve ; their borough interests to strengthen ; dinners, 
therefore, of various kinds to eat and give ? Were 
their means more than adequate to all this business, 
or less than adequate ? Less than adequate, in gen- 

25 eral ; few of them in reality were richer than Burns ; 



BURNS 87 

many of them were poorer ; for sometimes they had 
to wring their supplies, as with thumb-screws, from 
the hard hand ; and, in their need of guineas, to forget 
their duty of mercy ; which Burns was never reduced 
to do. Let us pity and forgive them. The game they 5 
preserved and shot, the dinners they ate and gave, the 
borough interests they strengthened, the little Baby- 
Ions they severally buil^ed by the glory of their might, 
are all melted or melting back into the primeval 
Chaos, as man's merely selfish endeavors are fated to 10 
do : and here was an action, extending, in virtue of 
its worldly influence, we may say, through all time ; 
in virtue of its moral nature, beyond all time, being 
immortal as the Spirit of Goodness itself ; this action 
was offered them to do, and light was not given them 15 
to do it. Let us pity and forgive them. But better 
than pity, let us go and do otherwise. Human suffering 
did not end with the life of Burns ; neither was the 
so]emn mandate, 'Love one another, bear one another's 
burdens,' given to the rich only, but to all men. True, 20 
we shall find no Burns to relieve, to assuage by our 
aid or our pity ; but celestial natures, groaning under 
the fardels of a weary life, we shall still find ; and 
that wretchedness which Fate has rendered voiceless 
and tuneless, is not the least wretched, but the most. 25 



88 BURNS 

Still, we do not think that the blame of Burns's 
failure lies chiefly with the world. The world, it 
seems to us, treated him with more rather than with 
less kindness than it usiially shows to such men. 

5 It has ever, we fear, shown but small favor to its 
Teachers : hunger and nakedness, perils and revilings, 
the prison, the cross, the poison-chalice have, in most 
times and countries, been the market-price it has 
offered for Wisdom, the welcome with which it has 

io greeted those who have come to enlighten and purify. 
Homer and Socrates, and the Christian Apostles, 
belong to old days ; but the world's Martyrology was 
not completed with these. Eoger BacOh and Galileo 
languish in priestly dungeons ; Tasso° pines in the 

15 cell of a madhouse ; Camoens°-'aies begging on the 
streets of Lisbon. So neglected, so ' persecuted they 
the Prophets,' not in Judea only, but in all places 
where men have been. We reckon that every poet of 
Burns's order is, or should be, a prophet and teacher 

20 to his age ; that he has no right to expect great kind- 
ness from it, but rather is bound to do it great kind- 
ness ; that Burns, in particular, experienced fully the 
usual proportion of the world's goodness ; and that the 
blame of his failure, as we have said, lies not chiefly 

25 with the world. 



BURNS 89 

Where, then, does it lie ? We are forced to answer : 
With himself ; it is his inward, not his outward mis- 
fortunes that bring him to the dust. Seldom, indeed, 
is it otherwise ; seldom is a life morally wrecked but 
the grand cause lies in some internal mal-arrangement, 5 
some want less of good fortune than of good guidance. 
Nature fashions no creature without implanting in it 
the strength needful for its action and duration ; least 
of all does she so neglect her masterpiece and darling, 
the poetic soul. Neither can we believe that it is in 10 
the power of any external circumstances utterly to 
ruin the mind of a man ; nay, if proper wisdom be 
given him, even so much as to affect its essential 
health and beauty. The sternest sum-total of all 
worldly misfortunes is Death; nothing more can lie 15 
in the cup of human woe : yet many men, in all ages, 
have triumphed over Death, and led it captive ; con- 
verting its physical victory into a moral victory for 
themselves, into a seal and immortal consecration for 
all that their past life had achieved. What has been 20 
done, may be done again: nay, it is but the degree 
and not the kind of such heroism that differs in differ- 
ent seasons ; for without some portion of this spirit, 
not of boisterous daring, but of silent fearlessness, of 
Self-denial in all its forms, no good man, in any 25 
scene or time, has ever attained to be good. 



90 BURNS 

We have already stated the error of Burns ; and 
mourned over it, rather than blamed it. It was the 
want of unity in his purposes, of consistency in his 
aims ; the hapless attempt to mingle in friendly union 
5 the common spirit of the world with the spirit of 
poetry, which is of a far different and altogether 
irreconcilable nature. Burns was nothing wholly, 
and Burns could be nothing, no man formed as he 
was can be anything, by halves. The heart, not of a 

io mere hot-blooded, popular Versemonger, or poetical 
Restaurateur, but of a true Poet and Singer, worthy 
of the old religious heroic times, had been given him : 
and he fell in an age, not of heroism and religion, but 
of scepticism, selfishness and triviality, when true 

15 Nobleness was little understood, and its place sup- 
plied by a hollow, dissocial, altogether barren and 
unfruitful principle of Pride. The influences of 
that age, his open, kind, susceptible nature, to say 
nothing of his highly untoward situation, made it 

20 more than usually difficult for him to cast aside, or 
rightly subordinate ; the better spirit that was within 
him ever sternly demanded its rights, its supremacy : 
he spent his life in endeavoring to reconcile these 
two ; and lost it, as he must lose it, without reconcil- 

25 ing them. 




BUBXS 91 

Burns was born poor ; and born also to continue 
poor, for he would not endeavor to be otherwise ; 
this it had been well could he have once for all 
idmitted, and considered as finally settled. He was 
>oor, truly ; but hundreds even of his own class and 5 
order of minds have been poorer, yet have suffered 
nothing deadly from it : nay, his own Father had a 
far sorer battle with ungrateful destiny than his was ; 
and he did not yield to it, but died courageously war- 
ring, and to all moral intents prevailing, against it. 10 
True, Burns had little means, had even little time for 
poetry, his only real pursuit and vocation; but so 
much the more precious was what little he had. In 
all these external respects his case was hard ; but 
very far from the hardest. Poverty, incessant drudg- 15 
ery,- and much worse evils, it has often been the lot of 
Poets and wise men to strive with, and their glory 
to conquer. Locke was banished as a traitor; and 
wrote his Essay on the Human Understanding shelter- 
ing himself in a Dutch garret. Was Milton rich or at 20 
his ease when he composed Paradise Lost ? Not only 
low, but fallen from a height : not only poor, but 
impoverished; in darkness and with dangers com- 
passed round, he sang his immortal song, and found 
fit audience, though few. Did not Cervantes finish 25 



92 BURNS 

his work, a maimed soldier and in prison ? Nay, 
was not the Araucana° which Spain acknowledges as 
its Epic, written without even the aid of a paper ; on 
scraps of leather, as the stout fighter and voyager 

5 snatched any moment from that wild warfare ? 

And what, then, had these men, which Burns 
wanted ? Two things ; both which, it seems to us, 
are indispensable for such men. They had a true, 
religious principle of morals ; and a single, not a 

io double aim in their activity. They were not self- 
seekers and self- worshippers ; but seekers and wor- 
shippers of something far better than Self. Not 
personal enjoyment was their object; but a high, 
heroic idea of Keligion, of Patriotism, of heavenly 

15 Wisdom, in one or the other form, ever hovered 
before them ; in which cause they neither shrank 
from suffering, nor called on the earth to witness it 
as something wonderful; but patiently endured, count- 
ing it blessedness enough so to spend and be spent. 

20 Thus the ' golden-calf of Self-love,' however curiously 
carved, was not their Deity ; but the Invisible Good- 
ness, which alone is man's reasonable service. This 
feeling was as a celestial fountain, whose streams 
refreshed into gladness and beauty all the provinces 

25 of their otherwise too desolate existence. In a word, 



BURNS 93 

they willed one thing, to which all other things were 
subordinated and made subservient; and therefore 
they accomplished it. The wedge will rend rocks; 
but its edge must be sharp and single : if it be double, 
the wedge is bruised in pieces, and will rend nothing. 5 

Part of this superiority these men owed to their 
age ; in which heroism and devotedness were still 
practised, or at least not yet disbelieved in : but 
much of it likewise they owed to themselves. With 
Burns, again, it was different. His morality, in most 10 
of its practical points, is that of a mere worldly man ; 
enjoyment, in a finer or coarser shape, is the only 
thing he longs and strives for. A noble instinct some- 
times raises him above this ; but an instinct only, and 
acting only for moments. He has no Keligion ; in 15 
the shallow age, where his days were cast, Religion 
was not discriminated from the New and Old Light 
forms of Religion ; and was, with these, becoming 
obsolete in the minds of men. His heart, indeed, is 
alive with a trembling adoration, but there is no 20 
temple in his understanding. He lives in darkness 
and in the shadow of doubt. His religion, at best, 
is an anxious wish; like that of Rabelais, <a great 
Perhaps.' 

He loved Poetry warmly, and in his heart; could 25 



94 BURKS 

he but have loved it purely, and with his whole undi- 
vided heart, it had been well. For Poetry, as Burns 
could have followed it, is but another form of Wis- 
dom, of Religion; is itself Wisdom and Religion. 
5 But this also was denied him. His poetry is a stray 
vagrant gleam, which will not be extinguished within 
him, yet rises not to be the true light of his path, but 
is often a wildfire that misleads him. It was not 
necessary for Burns to be rich, to be, or to seem, 

10 ( independent ' ; but it was necessary for him to be 
at one with his own heart ; to place what was high- 
est in his nature highest also in his life ; ' to seek 
within himself for that consistency and sequence, 
which external events would forever refuse him.' 

15 He was born a poet ; poetry was the celestial' - ele- 
ment of his being, and should have been the soul of 
his whole endeavors. Lifted into that serene ether, 
whither he had wings given him to mount, he would 
have needed no other elevation : poverty, neglect, and 

20 all evil, save the desecration of himself and his Art, 
were a small matter to him ; the pride and the pas- 
sions of the world lay far beneath his feet; and he 
looked down alike on noble and slave, on prince and 
beggar, and all that wore the stamp of man, with clear 

25 recognition, with brotherly affection, with sympathy, 



BURNS 95 

with pity. Nay, we question whether for his culture 
as a Poet poverty and much suffering for a season 
were not absolutely advantageous. Great men, in 
looking back over their lives, have testified to that 
effect. ' I would not for much/ says Jean Paul, 5 
' that I had been born richer.' And yet Paul's birth 
was poor enough ; for, in another place, he adds : 
' The prisoner's allowance is bread and water ; and I 
had often only the latter.' But the gold that is 
refined in the hottest furnace comes out the purest ; 10 
or, as he has himself expressed it, 'the canary-bird 
sings sweeter the longer it has been trained in a 
darkened cage.' 

A man like Burns might have divided his hours 
betw°en poetry and virtuous industry ; industry which 15 
all true feeling sanctions, nay prescribes, and which 
has a beauty, for that cause, beyond the pomp of 
thrones: but to divide his hours between poetry and 
rich men's banquets was an ill-starred and inauspi- 
cious attempt. How could he be at ease at such 20 
banquets ? What had he to do there, mingling his 
music with the coarse roar of altogether earthly 
voices ; brightening the thick smoke of intoxication 
with fire lent him from heaven ? Was it his aim to 
enjoy life? To-morrow he must go drudge as an 25 



96 BUKNS 

Exciseman! We wonder not that Burns became 
moody, indignant, and at times an offender against 
certain rules of society ; but rather that he did not 
grow utterly frantic, and run amuck against them all. 

5 How could a man, so falsely placed, by his own or 
others' fault, ever know contentment or peaceable 
diligence for an hour ? What he did, under such 
perverse guidance, and what he forbore to do, alike 
fill us with astonishment at the natural strength and 

10 worth of his character. 

Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness ; 
but not in others; only in himself; least of all in 
simple increase of wealth and worldly 'respectabil- 
ity.' We hope we have now heard enough about the 

15 efficacy of wealth for poetry, and to make poets 
happy. Nay, have we not seen another instance of it 
in these very days ? Byron, a man of an endowment 
considerably less ethereal than that of Burns, is born 
in the rank not of a Scottish ploughman, but of an 

20 English peer : the highest worldly honors, the fairest 
worldly career, are his by inheritance; the richest 
harvest of fame he soon reaps, in another province, 
by his own hand. And what does all this avail him ? 
Is he happy, is he good, is he true ? Alas, he has a 

^5 poet's soul, and strives towards the Infinite and the 



BURNS 97 

Eternal ; and soon feels that all this is but mounting 
to the house-top to reach the stars ! Like Burns, he 
is only a proud man; might, like him, have 'pur- 
chased a pocket-copy of Milton to study the character 
of Satan ' ; for Satan also is Byron's grand exemplar, 5 
the hero of his poetry, and the model apparently of 
his conduct. As in Burns' s case too, the celestial ele- 
ment will not mingle with the clay of earth ; both 
poet and man of the world he must not be ; vulgar 
Ambition will not live kindly with poetic Adoration ; 10 
he cannot serve God and Mammon. Byron, like Burns, 
is not happy ; nay, he is the most wretched of all men. 
His life is falsely arranged : the fire that is in him is 
not a strong, still, central fire, warming into beauty 
the products of a world ; but it is the mad fire of a 15 
volcano ; and now — we look sadly into the ashes of 
a crater, which ere long will fill itself with snow ! 
Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries to 
their generation, to teach it a higher Doctrine, a purer 
Truth; they had a message to deliver, which left 20 
them no rest till it was accomplished ; in dim throes 
of pain, this divine behest lay smouldering within 
them ; for they knew not what it meant, and felt it 
only in mysterious anticipation, and they had to die 
without articulately uttering it. They are in the 25 



98 BURNS 

camp of the Unconverted ; yet not as high messengers 
of rigorous though benignant truth, but as soft flatter- 
ing singers, and in pleasant fellowship will they live 
there : they are first adulated, then persecuted ; they 
5 accomplish little for others ; they find no peace for 
themselves, but only death and the peace of the grave. 
We confess, it is not without a certain mournful awe 
that we view the fate of these noble souls, so richly 
gifted, yet ruined to so little purpose with all their 

io gifts. It seems to us there is a stern moral taught in 
this piece of history, — twice told us in our own time! 
Surely to men of like genius, if there be any such, it 
carries with it a lesson of deep impressive signifi- 
cance. Surely it would become such a man, furnished 

15 for the highest of all enterprises, that of being the 
Poet of his Age, to consider well what it is that he 
attempts, and in what spirit he attempts it. For the 
words of Milton are true in all times, and were never 
truer than in this : ' He who would write heroic poems 

20 must make his whole life a heroic poem.' If he can- 
not first so make his life, then let him hasten from 
this arena ; for neither its lofty glories, nor its fearful 
perils, are for him. Let him dwindle into a modish 
balladmonger ; let him worship and be-sing the idols 

25 of the time, and the time will not fail to reward him. 



BURNS 99 

If, indeed, he can endure to live in that capacity ! 
Byron and Burns could not live as idol-priests, but 
the fire of their own hearts consumed them; and 
better it was for them that they could not. For it is 
not in the favor of the great or of the small, but in 5 
a life of truth, and. in the inexpugnable citadel of his 
own soul, that a Byron's or a Burns's strength must 
lie. Let the great stand aloof from him, or know how 
to reverence him. Beautiful is the union of wealth 
with favor and furtherance for literature ; like the 10 
costliest flower-jar enclosing the loveliest amaranth. 
Yet let not the relation be mistaken. A true poet is 
not one whom they can hire by money or flattery to 
be a minister of their pleasures, their writer of occa- 
sional verses, their purveyor of table-wit ; he cannot 15 
be their menial, he cannot even be their partisan. 
At the peril of both parties, let no such union be 
attempted ! Will a Courser of the Sun work softly in 
the harness of a Dray-horse ? His hoofs are of fire, 
and his path is through the heavens, bringing light to 20 
all lands ; will he lumber on mud highways, dragging 
ale for earthly appetites from door to door ? 

But we must stop short in these considerations, 
which would lead us to boundless lengths. We had 
something to say on the public moral character of 25 

Lore. 



100 BUBNS 

Burns; but this also we must forbear. We are far 
from regarding him as guilty before the world, as 
guiltier than the average ; nay, from doubting that 
he is less guilty than one of ten thousand. Tried at 

5 a tribunal far more rigid than that where the Ple- 
biscita of common civic reputations are pronounced, 
he has seemed to us even there less worthy of blame 
than of pity and wonder. But the world is habitually 
unjust in its judgments of such men ; unjust on many 

io grounds, of which this one may be stated as the sub- 
stance : It decides, like a court of law, by dead 
statutes; and not positively but negatively, less on 
what is done right, than on what is or is not done 
wrong. Not the few inches of deflection from the 

15 mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured, but 
the ratio of these to the whole diameter, constitutes 
the real aberration. This orbit may be a planet's, its 
diameter the breadth of the solar system ; or it may 
be a city hippodrome ; nay, the circle of a ginhorse, 

20 its diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches 
of deflection only are measured: and it is assumed 
that the diameter of the ginhorse, and that of the 
planet, will yield the same ratio when compared with 
them ! Here lies the root of many a blind, cruel 

25 condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Kousseaus, which 



BURNS 101 

one never listens to with approval. Granted, the 
ship comes into harbor with shrouds and tackle 
damaged ; the pilot is blameworthy ; he has not been 
all-wise and all-powerful : but to know hoiv blame- 
worthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been 5 
round the Globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of 
l)ogs°. 

With our readers in general, with men of right feel- 
ing anywhere, we are not required to plead for Burns. 
In pitying admiration he lies enshrined in all our 10 
hearts, in a far nobler mausoleum than that one of 
marble ; neither will his Works, even as they are, 
pass away from the memory of men. While the 
Shakespeares and Miltons roll on like mighty rivers 
through the country of Thought, bearing fleets of 15 
traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers on their waves ; 
this little Valclusa Fountain ° will also arrest our eye : 
for this also is of Nature's own and most cunning 
workmanship, bursts from the depths of the earth, 
with a full gushing current, into the light of day ; 20 
and often will the traveller turn aside to drink of its 
clear waters, and muse among its rocks and pines ! 



POEMS FROM BURNS 
THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT 

INSCRIBED TO ROBERT AIKEN, ESQ., OF AYR 

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil, 
♦ Their homely joys, and destiny obscure ; 
Nor Grandeur hear, with a disdainful smile, 
The short and simple annals of the Poor. — 

— Gray. 

My lov'd, my honor'd, much respected friend ! 

No mercenary bard his homage pays ; 
With honest pride, I scorn each selfish end, 

My dearest meed, a friend's esteem and praise : 
To you I sing, in simple Scottish lays, 

The lowly train in life's sequester'd scene ; 
The native feelings strong, the guileless ways ; 

What Aiken in a cottage would have been ; 
Ah ! tho' his worth unknown, far happier there, I ween. 

November chill blaws loud wi' angry sugh ; 
The short'ning winter-day is near a close ; 
103 



104 THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT 

The miry beasts retreating f rae the pleugh ; 

The black'ning trains o' craws to their repose : 
The toil-worn Cotter frae his labor goes, 

This night his weekly moil is at an end, 
Collects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes, 

Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend, 
And weary, o'er the moor, his course does hameward 
bend. 

At length his lonely cot appears in view, 

Beneath the shelter of an aged tree ; 
Th' expectant wee-things, toddlin, stacher through 

To meet their ' dad,' wi' flichterin noise an' glee. 
His wee bit ingle, blinkin bonilie, 

His clean hearth-stane, his thrifty wine's smile, 
The lisping infant prattling on his knee, 

Does a' his weary cafking cares beguile, 
An' makes him quite forget his labor an' his toil. 

Belyve, the elder bairns come drapping in, 
At service out, amang the farmers roun' ; 

Some ca' the pleugh, some herd, some tentie rin 
A cannie errand to a neibor town : 

Their eldest hope, their Jenny, woman-grown, 
In youthf u' bloom — love sparkling in her e'e — 



THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT 105 

Comes hame, perhaps, to shew a braw new gown, 

Or deposite her sair-won penny-fee, 
To help her parents dear, if they in hardship be. 

With joy unfeign'd brothers and sisters meet, 

An' each for other's weelfare kindly spiers : 
The social hours, swift-wing'd, nnnotic'd fleet ; -* 

Each tells the imcos that he sees or hears ; 
The parents, partial, eye their hopeful years ; 

Anticipation forward points the view ; 
The mother, wi' her needle an' her shears, 

Gars auld claes look amaist as weel's the new ; 
The father mixes a' wi' admonition due. 

Their master's an' their mistress's command, 

The yunkers a' are warned to obey ; 
An' mind their labors wi' an eydent hand, 

An' ne'er, tho' out o' sight, to jauk or play ; 
An' ! be sure to fear the Lord alway, 

" An' mind your duty, duly, morn an' night ! 
Lest in temptation's path ye gang astray, 

Implore His counsel and assisting might : 
They never sought in vain that sought the Lord aright." 

But hark ! a rap comes gently to the door ; 
Jenny, wha kens the meaning o' the same, 



106 THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT 

Tells how a neibor lad cam o'er the moor, 
To do some errands, and convoy her hame. 

The wily mother sees the conscious flame 
Sparkle in Jenny's e'e, and flush her cheek ; 

Wi' heart-struck anxious care, enquires his name, 
While Jenny hafnins is afraid to speak ; 

Weel-pleas'd the mother hears, it's nae wild, worthless 
rake. 

Wi' kindly welcome, Jenny brings hini ben ; 

A strappin' youth, he takes the mother's eye ; 
Blythe Jenny sees the visit's no ill ta'en ; 

The father cracks of horses, pleughs, and kye. 
The youngster's artless heart o'erflows wi' joy, 

But blate an' laithf u', scarce can weel behave ; 
The mother, wi' a woman's wiles, can spy 

What makes the youth sae bashf u' an' sae grave ; 
W r eel-pleas'd to think her bairn's respected like the 
lave. 

happy love ! where love like this is found ! 

heart-felt raptures ! bliss beyond compare ! 
I've paced much this weary, mortal round, 

And sage experience bids me this declare, — 
" If Heaven a draught of heavenly pleasure spare, 

One cordial in this melancholy vale, 



THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT 107 

'Tis when a youthful, loving, modest pair, 

In other's arms breathe out the tender tale, 
Beneath the milk-white thorn that scents the ev'ning 
gale." 

Is there, in human form, that bears a heart — 

A wretch ! a villain ! lost to love and truth ! 
That can, with studied, sly, ensnaring art, 

Betray sweet Jenny's unsuspecting youth ? 
Curse on his perjur'd arts! dissembling smooth! 

Are honor, virtue, conscience, all exil'd? 
Is there no pity, no relenting ruth, 

Points to the parents fondling o'er their child ? 
Then paints the ruin'd maid, and their distraction 
wild ? 

But now the supper crowns their simple board, 

The halsome parritch, chief o' Scotia's food ; 
The sowpe their only hawkie does afford, 

That 'yont the hallan snugly chows her cood : 
The dame brings forth, in complimental mood, 

To grace the lad, her weel-hain'd kebbuck, fell ; 
An ? aft he's prest, an' aft he ca's it guid ; 

The frugal wifie, garrulous, will tell, 
How 'twas a towmond auld, sin' lint was i' the bell. 



108 THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT 

The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face, 

They, round the ingle, form a circle wide ; 
The sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace, 

The big ha'-Bible, ance his father's pride : 
His bonnet rev'rently is laid aside, 

His lyart haffets wearing thin an' bare ; 
Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide, 

He wales a portion with judicious care, 
And " Let us worship God ! " he says, with solemn air. 

They chant their artless notes in simple guise, 

They tune their hearts, by far the noblest aim ; 
Perhaps ' Dundee's ' wild warbling measures rise, 

Or plaintive ' Martyrs,' worthy of the name ; 
Or noble ' Elgin ' beets the heaven-ward flame 

The sweetest far of Scotia's holy lays : 
Compar'd with these, Italian trills are tame ; 

The tickl'd ears no heartfelt raptures raise ; 
Nae unison hae they, with our Creator's praise. 

The priest-like father reads the sacred page, 
How Abram was the friend of G-od on high; 

Or, Moses bade eternal warfare wage 
With Amalek's ungracious progeny ; 

Or, how the royal Bard did groaning lie 

Beneath the stroke of Heaven's avenging ire; 



THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT 109 

Or Job's pathetic plaint, and wailing cry ; 

Or rapt Isaiah's wild, seraphic fire ; 
Or other holy Seers that tune the sacred lyre. 

Perhaps the Christian volume is the theme, 

How guiltless blood for guilty man was shed ; ~ 
How He, who bore in Heaven the second name, 

Had not on earth whereon to lay His head : 
How His first followers and servants sped ; 

The precepts sage they wrote to many a land : 
How he, who lone in Patmos banished, 

Saw in the sun a mighty angel stand ; 
And heard great Bab'lon's doom pronounc'd by 
Heaven's command. 

Then kneeling down, to Heaven's Eternal King, 

The saint, the father, and the husband prays : 
Hope " springs exulting on triumphant wing," 

That thus they all shall meet in future days, 
There, ever bask in uncreated rays, 

No more to sigh, or shed the bitter tear, 
Together hymning their Creator's praise, 

In such society, yet still more dear ; 
While circling Time moves round in an eternal sphere. 

Compar'd with this, how poor Religion's pride, v 
In all the pomp of method, and of art j 



110 THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT 

When men display to congregations wide 
Devotion's ev'ry grace, except the heart ! 

The Power, incens'd, the pageant will desert, 
The pompons strain, the sacerdotal stole ; 

But haply, in some cottage far apart, 

May hear, well pleas'd, the language of the soul ; 

And in his Book of Life the inmates poor enrol. 

Then homeward all take off their sev'ral way ; 

The youngling cottagers retire to rest : 
The parent-pair their secret homage pay, 

And proffer up to Heav'n the warm request, 
That He who stills the raven's clam'rous nest, 

And decks the lily fair in flow'ry pride, 
Would, in the way His wisdom sees the best, 

For them and for their little ones provide ; 
But chiefly, in their hearts with grace divine preside. 

From scenes like these old Scotia's grandeur springs, 
That makes her lov'd at home, rever'd abroad : 

Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, 
" An honest man's the noblest work of God : " 

And certes, in fair virtue's heavenly road, 
The cottage leaves the palace far behind ; 

What is a lordling's pomp ? a cumbrous load, 



THE COTTER'S SATURDAY NIGHT 111 

Disguising oft the wretch of human kind, 
Studied in arts of hell, in wickedness refin'd ! 

Scotia ! my dear,, my native soil ! 

For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent, 
Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil 

Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content ! 
And, Oh, may Heaven their simple lives prevent 

From luxury's contagion, weak and vile ! 
Then, howe'er crowns and coronets be rent, 

A virtuous populace may rise the while, 
And stand a wall of fire around their much-lov'd Isle. 

Thou ! who pour'd the patriotic tide, 

That stream'd thro' Wallace's undaunted heart, 
Who dar'd to, nobly, stem tyrannic pride, 

Or nobly die, the second glorious part : - 
(The patriot's God, peculiarly thou art, 

His friend, inspirer, guardian, and reward ! ) 
never, never, Scotia's realm desert ; 

But still the patriot, and the patriot-bard 
In bright succession raise, her ornament and guard ! 



112 MAN WAS MADE TO MOURN 

MAN WAS MADE TO MOURN 



When chill November's surly blast 

Made fields and forests bare, 
One ev'ning as I wander'd forth 

Along the banks of Ayr, 
I spy'd a man, whose aged step 

Seem'd weary, worn with care ; 
His face was furrow'd o'er with years, 

And hoary was his hair. 

Young stranger, whither wand'rest thou ? 

Began the rev'rend sage ; 
Does thirst of wealth thy step constrain, 

Or youthful pleasure's rage ? 
Or, haply, prest with cares and woes 

Too soon thou hast began 
To wander forth, with me, to mourn 

The miseries of man. 

The sun that overhangs yon moors, 

Out-spreading far and wide, 
Where hundreds labor to support 

A haughty lordling's pride j 



MAN WAS MADE TO MOURN 113 

I've seen yon weary winter sun 

Twice forty times return : 
And ev'ry time has added proofs, 

That man was made to mourn. 

man ! while in thy early years, 

How prodigal of time ! 
Mis-spending all thy precious hours, 

Thy glorious youthful prime ! 
Alternate follies take the sway ; 

Licentious passions burn ; 
Which tenfold force give nature's law, 

That man was made to mourn. 

Look not alone on youthful prime, 

Or manhood's active might ; 
Man then is useful to his kind, 

Supported in his right, 
But see him on the edge of life, 

With cares and sorrows worn, 
Then age and want, Oh ! ill-match'd pair ! 

Show man was made to raourn. 

A few seem favorites of fate, 

In pleasure's lap carest ; 
Yet, think not all the rich and great 

i 



114 MAN WAS MADE TO MOURN 

Are likewise truly blest. 
But, Oh ! what crowds in ev'ry land 

Are wretched and forlorn ; 
Thro' weary life this lesson learn, 

That man was made to mourn. 

Many and sharp the lium'rous ills 

Inwoven with our frames ! 
More pointed still we make ourselves, 

Regret, remorse, and shame ! 
And man, whose heaven-erected face 

The smiles of love adorn, 
Man's inhumanity to man 

Makes countless thousands mourn ! 

See yonder poor, o'erlabor'd wight, 

So abject, mean, and vile, 
Who begs a brother of the earth 

To give him leave to toil ; 
And see his lordly fellow-worm 

The poor petition spurn, 
Unmindful, tho' a weeping wife 

And helpless off-spring mourn. 

If I'm design'd yon lordling's slave, 
By nature's law design'd, 



MAX WAS MADE TO MOURN 111 

Why was an independent wish 

E'er planted in my mind ? 
If not, why am I subject to 

His cruelty, or scorn ? 
Or why has man the will and pow'r 

To make his fellow mourn ? 

Yet, let not this too much, my son, 

Disturb thy youthful breast ; 
This partial view of human-kind 

Is surely not the last ! 
The poor, oppressed, honest man, 

Had never, sure, been born, 
Had there not been some recompense 

To comfort those that mourn ! 

death ! the poor man's dearest friend, 

The kindest and the best ! 
Welcome the hour my aged limbs 

Are laid with thee at rest ! 
The great, the wealthy, fear thy blow, 

From pomp and pleasures torn; 
But, Oh ! a blest relief to those 

That weary-laden mourn ! 



116 A PRAYER 



A PRAYER, IN THE PROSPECT OF DEATH 

Thou unknown, Almighty Cause 

Of all my hope and fear ! 
In whose dread presence, ere an hour, 

Perhaps I must appear ! 

If I have wander'd in those paths 

Of life I ought to shun — 
As something, loudly in my breast, 

Remonstrates I have done — 

Thou know'st that Thou hast formed me 
With passions wild and strong ; 

And list'ning to their witching voice 
Has often led me wrong. 

Where human weakness has come short, 

Or frailty stept aside, 
Do Thou, All Good ! — for such Thou art — 

In shades of darkness hide. 

Where with intention I have err'd, 

No other plea I have, 
But, Thou art good ; and Goodness still 

Delighteth to forgive. 






MY FATHER WAS A FARMER 117 

MY FATHER WAS A FARMER 

Tune — " The Weaver and his Shuttle, O " 

My Father was a Farmer upon the Carrick border, 
And carefully he bred me in decency and order, 
He bade me act a manly part, though I had ne'er a 

farthing, 
For without an honest manly heart, no man was worth 

regarding, 0. 

Then out into the world my course I did determine, 

Tho' to be rich was not my wish, yet to be great was 
charming, 

My talents they were not the worst : nor yet my edu- 
cation, 

Resolv'd was I, at least to try, to mend my situation, 0. 

In many a way, and vain essay, I courted fortune's 

favor ; 
Some cause unseen still stept between, to frustrate each 

endeavor, O 
Sometimes by foes I was o'erpower'd ; sometimes by 

friends forsaken 5 
And when my hope was at the top, I still was worst 

mistaken, 0. 



118 MY FATHER WAS A FARMER 

Then sore harass'd, and tir'd at last, with fortune's 

vain delusion ; 
I dropt my schemes, like idle dreams, and came to this 

conclusion ; 
The past was bad, and the future hid ; its good or ill 

untried ; 
But the present hour was in my pow'r, and so I would 

enjoy it, 0. 

No help, nor hope, nor view had I ; nor person to be- 
friend me 5 

So I must toil, and sweat and broil, and labor to sus- 
tain me, 

To plough and sow, to reap and mow, my father bred 
me early ; 

For one, he said, to labor bred, was a match for fortune 
fairly, O. 

Thus all obscure, unknown, and poor, thro' life I'm 
doom'd to wander, 

Till down my weary bones I lay in everlasting slum- 
ber; 

No view nor care, but shun whate'er might breed me 
pain or sorrow ; 

I live to-day as well's I may, regardless of to-mor- 
row, 0. 



MY FATHER WAS A FARMER 119 

But cheerful still, I am as well as a monarch in a 

palace, 
Tho' fortune's frown still hunts me down, with all her 

wonted malice ; 
I make indeed my daily bread, but ne'er can make it 

farther; 
But as daily bread is all I need, I do not much regard 

her, 0. 

When sometimes by my labor I earn a little money, O 
Some unforeseen misfortune comes gen 'rally upon 

me; 
Mischance, mistake, or by neglect, or my good-natur'd 

folly ; 
But come what will, I've sworn it still, I'll ne'er be 

melancholy, 0. 

All you who follow wealth and power, with unremit- 
ting ardor, 

The more in this you look for bliss, you leave your 
view the farther ; 

Had you the wealth Potosi boasts, or nations to adore 
you, 

A cheerful honest-hearted clown I will prefer before 
you, 0. 



120 THE FARMER'S SALUTATION TO HIS MARE 

THE AULD FARMER'S NEW-YEAR MORN- 
ING SALUTATION TO HIS AULD MARE, 
MAGGIE, 

ON GIVING HER THE ACCUSTOMED RIPP OF CORN TO HANSEL IN 
THE NEW YEAR 

A guid New- Year I wish thee, Maggie ! 
Hae, there's a ripp to thy auld baggie : 
Tho' thou's howe-backit, now, an' knaggie, 

I've seen the day, 
Thou could hae gone like ony staggie 

Out-owre the lay. 

Tho' now thou's dowie, stiff, an' crazy, 
An' thy auld hide's as white's a daisie, 
I've seen thee dappl't, sleek an' glaizie, 

A bonie gray : 
He should been tight that daur't to raize thee, 

Ance in a day. 

Thou ance was i' the foremost rank, 
A filly buirdly, steeve, an' swank, 
An' set weel down a shapely shank, 
As e'er tread yird ; 



THE FARMER'S SALUTATION TO HIS MARE 121 

An' could hae flown out-owre a stank, 
Like ony bird. 

It's now some nine-an'-twenty year, 
Sin' thou was my guid-f ather's meere ; 
He gied me thee, o' tocher clear, 

An' fifty mark ; 
Tho' it was sma', 'twas weel-won gear, 

An' thou was stark. 

When first I gaed to woo my Jenny, 
Ye then was trottin wi' your minnie : 
Tho' ye was trickie, slee, an' funnie, 

Ye ne'er was donsie ; 
But namely, tawie, quiet, an' cannie, 

An unco sonsie. 

That day, ye pranc'd wi' muckle pride, 
When ye bure hame my bonie bride ; 
An' sweet an' gracefu' she did ride, 

Wi' maiden air ! 
Kyle-Stewart I could bragged wide, 

For sic a pair. 

Tho' now ye dow but hoyte and hoble 
An' wintle like a saumont-coble, 



122 THE FARMER'S SALUTATION TO HIS MARE 

That day ye was a j inker noble 

For heels an' win' ! 
An' ran them till they a' did wauble, 

Far, far behin'. 

When them an' I were young and skeigh, 

An' stable-meals at fairs were driegh, 

How thou wad prance, an' snore, an' skriegh 

An' tak the road ! 
Town's-bodies ran, and stood abeigh, 

An' ca't thee mad. 

When thou was corn't, an' I was mellow, 
We took the road ay like a swallow : 
At brooses thou had ne'er a fellow, 

For pith an' speed ; 
But ev'ry tail thou pay't them hollow, 

Whare'er thou gaed. 

The sma', droop-rumpl't, hunter cattle, 
Might aiblins waur't thee for a brattle ; 
But sax Scotch miles thou try't their mettle, 

An' gart them whaizle : 
Nae whip nor spur, but just a wattle 

0' saugh or hazel. 



Thou was a noble fittie-lan', 

As e'er in tug or tow was drawn ! 

Aft thee an' I, in aught hours gaun, 

On guid March-weather 
Hae turn'd sax rood beside our han', 

For days thegither. 

Thou never braindg't, an' fetch't, an' fliskit, 
But thy auld tail thou wad hae whiskit 
An' spread abreed thy weel-fill'd briskit, 

Wi' pith an' pow'r, 
Till spritty knowes wad rair't and riskit, 

An' slypet owre. 

When frosts lay lang, an' snaws were deep. 
An' threaten' d labor back to keep, 
I gied thy cog a wee-bit heap 

Aboon the timmer ; 
I ken'd my Maggie wad na sleep 

For that, or simmer. 

In cart or car thou never reestit ; 
The steyest brae thou wad hae face't it ; 
Thou never lap, an' sten't, and breastit, 
Then stood to blaw ; 



124 THE FARMER'S SALUTATION TO HIS MARE 

But just thy step a wee thing hastit, 
Thou snoov't awa. 

My pleugh is now thy bairn-time a' : 
Four gallant brutes as e'er did draw ; 
For bye sax niae, I've sell't awa, 

That thou hast nurst : 
They drew me thretteen pund an' twa, 

The vera warst. 

Monie a sair daurk we twa hae wrought, 
An' wi' the weary warl' fought ! 
An' monie an anxious day, I thought 

We wad be beat ! 
Yet here to crazy age we're brought, 

Wi' something yet. 

And think na, my auld, trusty servan', 
That now perhaps thou's less deservin, 
An' thy auld days may end in star v in, 

For my last fou, 
A heapit stimpart, I'll reserve ane 

Laid by for you. 

We've worn to crazy years thegither ; 
We'll toy te about wi' ane anither ; 



THE FARMER'S SALUTATION TO HIS MARE 125 

Wi' tentie care I'll flit thy tether 

To some hain'd rig, 
Whare ye may nobly rax your leather, 

Wi' sma' fatigue. 

TO A MOUSE 

ON TURNING HER UP IN HER NEST WITH THE PLOUGH, 
NOVEMBER, 1785 

Wee, sleekit, cow'rin, tim'rous beastie, 
0, what a panic's in thy breastie ! 
Thou need na start awa sae hasty, 

Wi' bickering brattle ! 
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee, 

Wi' murd'ring pattle ! 

I'm truly sorry man's dominion 
Has broken Nature's social union, 
An' justifies that ill opinion, 

Which makes thee startle, 
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion, 

An' fellow-mortal ! 

I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve ; 
What then ? poor beastie, thou maun live ! 



126 TO A MOUSE 

A daimen-icker in a thrave 

'S a sma' request : 

I'll get a blessin wi' the lave, 

And never miss't ! 

Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin ! 
Its silly wa's the win's are strewin ! 
An' naething, now, to big a new ane, 

0' f oggage green ! 
An' bleak December's winds ensuin, 

Baith snell an' keen ! 

Thou saw the fields laid bare and waste, 
An' weary winter comin fast, 
An' cozie here, beneath the blast, 

Thou thought to dwell, 
Till crash ! the cruel coulter past, 

Out thro' thy cell. 

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble, 
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble ! 
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble 

But house or hald, 
To thole the winter's sleety dribble, 

An' cranreuch cauld ! 



TO A MOUSE 127 

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane, 
In proving foresight may be vain : 
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men 

Gang aft a-gley, 
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain, 

For promis'd joy. 

Still thou art blest, compar'd wi' me ! 
The present only toucheth thee : 
But, Och ! I backward cast my e'e 

On prospects drear ! 
An' forward, tho' I canna see, 

I guess an' fear ! 



ON SEEING A WOUNDED HARE LIMP BY 
ME, WHICH A FELLOW HAD JUST SHOT 

Inhuman man ! curse on thy barb'rous art, 
And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye ; 
May never pity soothe thee with a sigh, 

Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart ! 

Go, live, poor wanderer of the wood and field, 
The bitter little that of life remains : 



128 THE WOUNDED HARE 

No more the thickening brakes and verdant plains 
To thee shall home, or food, or pastime yield. 

Seek, mangled wretch, some place of wonted rest, 
No more of rest, but now thy dying bed ! 
The sheltering rushes whistling o'er thy head, 

The cold earth with thy bloody bosom prest. 

Oft as by winding Kith, I, musing, wait 
The sober eve, or hail the cheerful dawn, 
I'll miss thee sporting o'er the dewy lawn, 

And curse the ruffian's aim, and mourn thy hapless 
fate. 



POOR MAILIE'S ELEGY 

Lament in rhyme, lament in prose, 
Wi' saut tears trickling down your nose ; 
Our Bardie's fate is at a close, 

Past a' remead ; 
The last, sad cape-stane of his woes ; 

Poor Mailie's dead ! 

It's no the loss o' warl's gear, 
That could sae bitter draw the tear, 



POOR MAILIE' S ELEGY 129 

Or mak our Bardie, dowie, wear 

The mournin weed: 
He's lost a friend and neibor dear, 

In Mailie dead. 

Thro' a' the toun she trotted by him ; 
A lang half-mile she could descry him ; 
Wi' kindly bleat, when she did spy him, 

She ran wi' speed : 
A friend mair faithfu' ne'er cam nigh him, 

Than Mailie dead. 

I wat she was a sheep o'- sense, 
An' could behave hersel wi' mense ; 
I'll say't, she never brak a fence, 

Thro' thievish greed. 
Our Bardie, lanely, keeps the spence 

Sin' Mailie's dead. 

Or, if he wanders up the howe 

Her living image in her yowe 

Comes bleating to him, owre the knowe, 

For bits o' bread ; 
An' down the briny pearls rowe 

For Mailie dead. 



130 POOR MAILIE'S ELEGY 

She was nae get o' moorland tips, 

Wi' tawted ket, an' hairy hips ; 

For her forbears were brought in ships, 

Frae yont the Tweed : 
A bonier fleesh ne'er cross'd the clips 

Than Mailie's dead. 

Wae worth the man wha first did shape 
That vile, wanchancie thing — a rape ! 
It maks guid fellows grin an' gape, 

Wi' chokin dread ; 
An' Robin's bonnet wave wi' crape, 

For Mailie dead. 

O, a' ye Bards on bonie Doon ! 

An' wha on Ayr your chanters tune ! 

Come, join the melancholious croon 

0' Eobin's reed ! 
His heart will never get aboon ! 

His Mailie's dead ! 






A WINTER NIGHT 131 



A WINTER NIGHT 

Poor naked wretches, whei-esoe'er you are, 
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm ! 
How shall your houseless heads, and unfed sides, 
Your loop'd and ivindow'd raggedness, defend you, 
From seasons such as these ? 

— Shakespeare. 

When biting Boreas, fell and doure, 
Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r ; 
When Phoebus gies a short-liv'd glow'r, 

Far south the lift, 
Dim-dark'ning thro' the flaky show'r, 

Or whirling drift : 

Ae night the storm the steeples rocked, 
Poor Labor sweet in sleep was locked, 
While burns, wi' snawy wreeths up-choked, 

Wild-eddying swirl, 
Or thro' the mining outlet bocked, 

Down headlong hurl. 

List'ning, the doors an' winnocks rattle, 
I thought me on the ourie cattle, 
Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 
0' winter war, 



132 A WINTER NIGHT 

And thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle, 
Beneath a scar. 

Ilk happing bird, wee, helpless thing ! 
That, in the merry months o' spring, 
Delighted me to hear thee sing, 

What comes o' thee ? 
Whare wilt thon cow'r thy cluttering wing 

An' close thy e'e ? 

Ev'n you on murd'ring errands toil'd, 
Lone from your savage homes exil'd, 
The blood-stain'd roost, and sheep-cote spoil'd 

My heart forgets, 
While pityless the tempest wild 

Sore on you v beats. 

Now Phoebe, in her midnight reign, 
Dark muffled, view'd the dreary plain ; 
Still crowding thoughts, a pensive train, 

Rose in my soul, 
When on my ear this plaintive strain, 

Slow, solemn, stole — 

" Blow, blow, ye winds, with heavier gust ! 
And freeze, thou bitter-biting frost ! 



A WINTER NIGHT 133 

Descend, ye chilly, smothering snows ! 
Not all your rage, as now, united shows 
More hard unkindness, unrelenting, 
Vengeful malice, un repenting, 
Than heav'n-illumin'd man on brother man bestows ! 

" See stern Oppression's iron grip, 
Or mad Ambition's gory hand, 

Sending, like blood-hounds from the slip 
Woe, want, and murder o'er a land ! 

Ev'n in the peaceful rural vale, 

Truth, weeping, tells the mournful tale, 
How pamper'd Luxury, Flatt'ry by her side, 

The parasite empoisoning her ear, 

With all the servile wretches in the rear, 
Looks o'er proud property, extended wide ; 

And eyes the simple rustic hind, 

Whose toil upholds the glitt'ring show, 

A creature of another kind, 

Some coarser substance, unrefin'd, 
Plac'd for her lordly use thus far, thus vile, below. 

"Where, where is Love's fond, tender throe, 
With lordly Honor's lofty brow, 
The pow'rs you proudly own ? 
Is there, beneath Love's noble name, 



134 A WINTER NIGHT 

Can harbor, dark, the selfish aim, 
To bless himself alone ! 

Mark maiden-innocence a prey- 
To love-pretending snares, 

This boasted honor turns away, 

Shunning soft pity's rising sway, 
Regardless of the tears, and unavailing pray'rs ! 

Perhaps this hour, in mis'ry's squalid nest, 

She strains your infant to her joyless breast, 
And with a mother's fears shrinks at the rocking blast ! 

" Oh ye ! who, sunk in beds of down, 

Feel not a want but what yourselves create, 

Think, for a moment, on his wretched fate, 

Whom friends and fortune quite disown ! 
Ill-satisfied keen nature's clam'rous call, 

Stretch'd on his straw he lays himself to sleep, 
While thro' the ragged roof and chinky wall, 

Chill o'er his slumbers, piles the drifty heap ! 
Think on the dungeon's grim confine, 
Where guilt and poor misfortune pine ! 
Guilt, erring man, relenting view ! 
But shall thy legal rage pursue 
The wretch, already crushed low, 
By cruel fortune's undeserved blow ? 



WINTER 135 

Affliction's sons are brothers in distress ; 

A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss ! " 

I heard nae mair, for Chanticleer 

Shook off the pouthery snaw, 
And hail'd the morning with a cheer, 

A cottage-rousing craw. 

^But deep this truth impress'd my mind 
Thro' all His works abroad, 
The heart benevolent and kind 
The most resembles God. ) 



WINTER 



The wintry west extends his blast, 

And hail and rain does blaw ; 
Or the stormy north sends driving forth 

The blinding sleet and snaw : 
While, tumbling brown, the burn comes down, 

And roars frae bank to brae : 
And bird and beast in covert rest, 

And pass the heartless day. 



136 WINTER 

" The sweeping blast, the sky o'ercast," 

The joyless winter day, 
Let others fear, to me more dear 

Than all the pride of May : 
The tempest's howl, it soothes my soul, 

My griefs it seems to join ; 
The leafless trees my fancy please, 

Their fate resembles mine ! 

Thou Pow'r Supreme, whose mighty scheme 

These woes of mine fulfil, 
Here, firm, I rest, they must be best, 

Because they are Thy will ! 
Then all I want (Oh ! do thou grant 

This one request of mine !) 
Since to enjoy thou dost deny, 

Assist me to resign. 

TO A MOUNTAIN DAISY 

ON TURNING ONE DOWN WITH THE PLOUGH, IN APRIL, 1786 

Wee, modest, crimson-tipped flow'r, 
Thou's met me in an evil hour ; 
For I maun crush amang the stoure 
Thy slender stem. 



TO A MOUNTAIN DAISY 137 

To spare thee now is past my pow'r, 
Thou boilie gem. 

Alas ! it's no thy neibor sweet, 
The bonnie lark, companion meet ! 
Bending thee 'mang the dewy weet ! 

Wi' spreckl'd breast, 
When upward-springing, blythe, to greet 

The purpling east. 

Cauld blew the bitter-biting north 
Upon thy early, humble birth; 
Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth 

Amid the storm, 
Scarce rear'd above the parent-earth 

Thy tender form. 

The flaunting flow'rs our gardens yield, 
High shelt'ring woods and wa's maun shield, 
But thou, beneath the random bield 

0' clod or stane, 
Adorns the histie stibble-field, 

Unseen, alane. 

There, in thy scanty mantle clad, 
Thy snawie bosom sun-ward spread, 



138 TO A MOUNTAIN DAISY 

Thou lifts thy unassuming head 
In humble guise ; 

But now the share uptears thy bed, 
And low thou lies ! 

Such is the fate of artless maid, 
Sweet flow'ret of the rural shade ! 
By love's simplicity betray'd, 

And guileless trust, 
Till she, like thee, all soil'd, is laid 

Low i' the dust. 

Such is the fate of simple bard, 

On life's rough ocean luckless starr'd ! 

Unskilful he to note the card 

Of prudent lore, 
Till billows rage, and gales blow hard, 

And whelm him o'er ! 

Such fate to suffering worth is giv'n, 
Who long with wants and woes has striv'n, 
By human pride or cunning driv'n 

To mis'ry's brink, 
Till wrench'd of ev'ry stay but Heav'n, 

He, ruin'd, sink ! 



AFTON WATER 139 

Ev'n thou who mourn'st the Daisy's fate, 
That fate is thine — no distant date ; 
Stern Ruin's ploughshare drives, elate, 

Full on thy bloom, 
Till crush'd beneath the furrow's weight, 

Shall be thy doom ! 

^FTON WATER 

Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes, 
Flow gently, I'll sing thee a song in thy praise ; 
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream, 
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream. 

Thou stock-dove whose echo resounds thro' the glen, 
Ye wild whistling blackbirds in yon thorny den, 
Thou green-crested lapwing, thy screaming forbear, 
I charge you disturb not my slumbering fair. 

How lofty, sweet Afton, thy neighboring hills, 
Far mark'd with the courses of clear, winding rills ; 
There daily I wander as noon rises high, 
My flocks and my Mary's sweet cot in my eye. 

How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below, 
Where wild in the woodlands the primroses blow ; 



140 AFTON WATER 

There oft as mild ev'ning weeps over the lea, 
The sweet-scented birk shades my Mary and me. 

Thy crystal stream, Afton, how lovely it glides, 
And winds by the cot where my Mary resides ; 
How wanton thy waters her snowy feet lave, 
As gathering sweet flow'rets she stems thy clear 
wave. 

Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes, 
Flow gently, sweet river, the theme of my lays ; 
My Mary's asleep by thy murmuring stream, 
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream. 

THE BANKS 0' DOON 

Tune — " The Caledonian Hunt's Delight " 

Ye banks and braes o' bonie Doon, 

How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair ? 
How can ye chant, ye little birds, 

And I sae weary fu' o' care ! 
Thou'lt break my heart, thou warbling bird, 

That wantons thro' the flowering thorn : 
Thou minds me o' departed joys, 

Departed — never to return. 



DUNCAN GRAY 141 

Aft hae I rov'd by bonie Doon, 

To see the rose and woodbine twine ; 
And ilka bird sang o' its Luve, 

And fondly sae did I o' mine ; 
Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose, 

Fu' sweet upon its thorny tree ! 
And my fause Luver staw my rose, 

But ah ! he left the thorn wi' me. 

^DUNCAN GRAY 

Duncan Gray cam here to woo, 
Ha, ha, the wooing o't, 

On blythe yule night when we were fou, 
Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 

Maggie coost her head fu high, 

Look'd asklent and unco skeigh, 

Gart poor Duncan stand abeigh ; 
Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 

Duncan fleech'd, and Duncan pray'd, 

Ha, ha, &c. 
Meg was deaf as Ailsa Craig, 

Ha, ha, &c. 
Duncan sigh'd baith out and in, 



142 DUNCAN GRAY 

Grat his een baith bleer't and blin', 
Spak o' lowpin o'er a linn ; 
Ha, ha, &c. 

Time and chance are but a tide, 

Ha, ha, &c. 
Slighted love is sair to bide, 

Ha, ha, &c. 
Shall I, like a fool, quoth he, 
For a haughty hizzie die ? 
She may gae to — France for me ! 

Ha, ha, &c. 

How it comes let doctors tell, 

Ha, ha, &c. 
Meg grew sick, as he grew well, 

Ha, ha, &c. 
Something in her bosom wrings, 
For relief a sigh she brings ; 
And 0, her een, they spak sic things ! 

Ha, ha, &c. 

Duncan was a lad o' grace, 

Ha, ha, &c. 
Maggie's was a piteous case, 

Ha, ha, &c. 



AULD LANG SYNE 143 

Duncan couldna be her death, 
Swelling pity smoor'd his wrath ; 
Now they're crouse and cantie baith ; 
Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 

^AULD LANG SYNE 

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, 

And never brought to min' ? 
Should auld acquaintance be forgot, 

And auld lang syne ? 

CHORUS. 

For auld lang syne, my dear, 

For auld lang syne, 
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet, 

For auld lang syne. 

We twa hae run about the braes, 

And pu'd the gowans fine, 
But we've wander'd mony a weary foot 

Sin' auld lang syne. 
For auld, &c. 

We twa hae paidl't i' the burn, 
From morning sun till dine j 



144 { AULD LANG SYNE 

But seas between us braid hae roar'd 
Sin' auld lang syne. 
For auld, &c. 

And here's a hand, my trusty tier, 

And gie's a hand o' thine ; 
And we'll tak a right guid-willie waught, 

For auld lang syne. 
For auld, &c. 



HIGHLAND MAEY 

Tune — " Katherine Ogie " 

Ye banks, and braes, and streams around 

The castle o' Montgomery ! 
Green be your woods, and fair your flowers, 

Your waters never drumly : 
There simmer first unf auld her robes, 

And there the langest tarry ; 
For there I took the last fareweel 

0' my sweet Highland Mary. 

How sweetly bloom'd the gay green birk, 
How rich the hawthorn's blossom, 



HIGHLAND MARY , 145 



As underneath their fragrant shade, 

I clasp'd her to my bosom ! 
The golden hours, on angel wings, 

Flew o'er me and my dearie ; 
For dear to me, as light and life, 

Was my sweet Highland Mary. 

Wi' mony a vow, and lock'd embrace, 

Our parting was f u' tender ; 
And, pledging aft to meet again, 

We tore oursels asunder ; 
But oh ! fell death's untimely frost, 

That nipt my flower sae early ! 
Now green's the sod, and cauld's the clay, 

That wraps my Highland Mary. 

O pale, pale now, those rosy lips, 

I aft hae kiss'd sae fondly ! 
And closed for aye the sparkling glance, 

That dwelt on me sae kindly! 
And mould'ring now in silent dust, 

That heart that lo'ed me dearly ! 
But still within my bosom's core 

Shall live my Highland Mary. 



146 TO MARY W HEAVEN 

TO MAEY IN HEAVEN 

Tune — "3fiss Forbes' farewell to Banff" 

Thou lingering star, with less'ning ray, 

Thou lov'st to greet the early morn, 
Again thou usher'st in the day 

My Mary from my soul was torn. 
Mary ! dear departed shade ! 

Where is thy place of blissful rest ? 
Seest thou thy lover lowly laid ? 

Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast ? 

That sacred hour can I forget ? 

Can I forget the hallow'd grove, 
Where by the winding Ayr we met, 

To live one day of parting love ? 
Eternity will not efface 

Those records dear of transports past ; 
Thy image at our last embrace ; 

Ah ! little thought we 'twas our last ! 

Ayr gurgling kiss'd his pebbled shore, 

O'erhung with wild woods, thick'ning green • 

The fragrant birch, and hawthorn hoar, 
Twin'd am'rous round the raptur'd scene. 

The flowers sprang wanton to be prest, 



ODE TO MRS. OSWALD 147 

The birds sang love on ev'ry spray, 
Till too, too soon, the glowing west 
Proclaim'd the speed of winged day. 

Still o'er these scenes my mem'ry wakes, 

And fondly broods with miser care ! 
Time but the impression deeper makes, 

As streams their channels deeper wear. 
My Mary, dear departed shade ! 

Where is thy place of blissful rest ? 
Seest thou thy lover lowly laid ? 

Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast ? 

ODE, SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF MRS. 
OSWALD 

Dweller in yon dungeon dark, 
Hangman of creation ! mark, 
Who in widow-weeds appears, 
Laden with unhonor'd years, 
Noosing with care a bursting purse, 
Baited with many a deadly curse ? 

STROPHE 

View the wither'd beldam's face — 
Can thy keen inspection trace 



148 ODE TO MEMORY OF MRS. OSWALD 

Aught of humanity's sweet melting grace ? 

Note that eye, 'tis rheum o'erflows, 

Pity's flood there never rose. 

See those hands, ne'er stretch' d to save, 

Hands that took — but never gave. 

Keeper of Mammon's iron chest, 

Lo, there she goes, unpitied and unblest 

She goes, but not to realms of everlasting rest ! 

ANTISTROPHE 

Plunderer of armies, lift thine eyes, 

(A while forbear, ye tort'ring fiends,) 

Seest thou whose step unwilling hither bends ? 

No fallen angel, hurl'd from upper skies ; 

'Tis thy trusty quondam mate, 

Doom'd to share thy fiery fate, 

She, tardy, hell-ward plies. 

EPODE 

And are they of no more avail, 

Ten thousand glitt'ring pounds a year ? 

In other worlds can Mammon fail, 

Omnipotent as he is here ? 

0, bitter mock'ry of the pompons bier, 

While down the wretched vital part is driv'n ! 



MY NANNIE' S AWA 149 

The cave-lodg'd beggar, with a conscience clear, 
Expires in rags, unknown, and goes to Heav'n. 



MY NANNIE'S AWA 

Tune — " There'll never be peace till Jamie comes hame" 

Now in her green mantle blythe Nature arrays, 
And listens the lambkins that bleat o'er the braes, 
While birds warble welcomes in ilka green shaw; 
But to me it's delightless — my Nannie's awa. 

The snaw-drop and primrose our woodlands adorn, 
And violets bathe in the weet o' the morn : 
They pain my sad bosom, sae sweetly they blaw, 
They mind me o' Nannie — my Nannie's awa. 

Thou laverock that springs frae the dews o' the lawn. 
The shepherd to warn o' the gray -breaking dawn, 
And thou, yellow mavis, that hails the night-fa', 
Gie over for pity — my Nannie's awa. 

Come autumn sae pensive, in yellow and gray, 
And soothe me wi' tidings o' Nature's decay ; 
The dark, dreary winter, and wild-driving snaw, 
Alane can delight me — now Nannie's awa. 



150 O, WERT THOU 

0, WERT THOU IN THE CAULD BLAST 

Tune — " The Lass of Livingstone " 

0. wert thou in the cauld blast, 

On yonder lea, on yonder lea, 
My plaidie to the angry airt, 

I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee. 
Or did misfortune's bitter storms 

Around thee blaw, around thee blaw, 
Thy bield should be my bosom, 

To share it a', to share it a'. 

Or were I in the wildest waste, 

Of earth and air, of earth and air, 
The desert were a paradise, 

If thou wert there, if thou wert there. 
Or were I monarch o' the globe, 

Wi' thee to reign, wi' thee to reign, 
The only jewel in my crown 

Wad be my queen, wad be my queen. 



4 



JOHN ANDERSON MY JO 

John Anderson - my jo, John, 
When we were first acquent, 



FAREWELL TO AYR 151 

Your locks were like the raven, 

Your bonie brow was brent ; 
But now your brow is held, John, 

Your locks are like the snaw ; 
But blessings on your frosty pow, 

John Anderson ray jo. 

John Anderson my jo, John, 

We clamb the hill thegither ; 
And monie a can tie day, John, 

We've had wi' ane anither : 
Now we maun totter down, John, 

But hand in hand we'll go, 
And sleep thegither at the foot, 

John Anderson my jo. 

FAREWELL TO AYE, 

Tune — "Rodin Castle" 

The gloomy night is gath'ring fast, 
Loud roars the wild inconstant blast, 
Yon murky cloud is foul with rain, 
I see it driving o'er the plain ; 
The hunter now has left the moor, 



152 FAREWELL TO AYR 

The scattered coveys meet secure, 
While here I wander, prest with care, 
Along the lonely banks of Ayr. • 

The Autumn mourns her rip'ning corn 
By early Winter's ravage torn ; 
Across her placid, azure sky, 
She sees the scowling tempest fly : 
Chill runs my blood to hear it rave, 
I think upon the stormy wave, 
Where many a danger I must dare, 
Far from the bonie banks of Ayr. 

'Tis not the surging billow's roar, 
'Tis not that fatal, deadly shore ; 
Tho' death in ev'ry shape appear, 
The wretched have no more to fear : 
But round my heart the ties are bound, 
That heart transpierc'd with many a wound 
These bleed afresh, those ties I tear, 
To leave the bonie banks of Ayr. 

Farewell, old Coila's hills and dales, 
Her heathy moors and winding vales ; 
The scenes where wretched fancy roves, 
Pursuing past, unhappy loves ! 



Ji 



MY HEART'S IN THE HIGHLANDS 153 

Farewell, my friends ! Farewell, my foes ! 
My peace with these, my love with those : 
The bursting tears my heart declare — 
Farewell, the bonie banks of Ayr. 

/ 
MY HEART'S IN THE HIGHLANDS 



My heart's in the Highland's, my heart is not here ; 
My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer ; 
Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe, 
My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go. 
Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North, 
The birth-place of valor, the country of worth ; 
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove, 
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love. 



L o* 



Farewell to the mountains high cover'd with snow ; 
Farewell to the straths and green valleys below ; 
Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods ; 
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods. 
My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here ; 
My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer ; 
Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe, 
My heart's in* the Highlands, wherever I go. 



154 MACPHERSON'S FAREWELL 



MACPHEKSON'S FAKEWELL 

Farewell, ye dungeons dark and strong, 

The wretch's destinie ! 
Macpherson's time will not be long 

On yonder gallows tree. 

CHORUS. 

Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, 

Sae dauntingly gaed he; 
He play'd a spring and danc'd it round, 

Below the gallows tree. 

Oh, what is death but parting breath ? 

On monie a bloody plain 
I've dar'd his face, and in this place 

I scorn him yet again ! 

Sae rantingly, &c. 

Untie these bands from off my hands, 

And bring to me my sword ; 
And there's no man in all Scotland, 

But I'll brave him at a word. 
Sae rantingly, &c. • 



BANNOCKBURN 155 

I've liv'd a life of sturt and strife ; 

I die by treacherie : 
It burns my heart I must depart 

And not avenged be. 

Sae rantingly, &c. 

Now farewell light, thou sunshine bright, 

And all beneath the sky ! 
May coward shame disdain his name, 

The wretch that dares not die ! 
Sae rantingly, &c. 

<J BANNOCKBURN 

ROBERT BRUCE'S ADDRESS TO HIS ARMY 

To its ain Tune 

Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled, 
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led, 
Welcome to your gory bed, 
Or to victory ! 

Now's the day, and now's the hour ; 
See the front o' battle lower ; 
See approach proud Edward's power, 
Chains and slavery ! 



156 BANNOCKBURN 

Wha will be a traitor knave ? 
Wha can fill a coward's grave ? 
Wha sae base as be a slave ? 
Let him turn and flee ! 

Wha for Scotland's king and law 
Freedom's sword will strongly draw, 
Free-man stand, or free-man fa', 
Let him on wi' me ! 

By oppression's woes and pains ! 
By your sons in servile chains ! 
We will drain our dearest veins, 
But they shall be free ! 

Lay the proud usurpers low ! 
Tyrants fall in every foe ! 
Liberty's in every blow ! 
Let us do — or die ! 

THE DUMFRIES VOLUNTEERS 

Tune — " Push about the jorum " 

Does haughty Gaul invasion threat ? 

Then let the loons beware, Sir, 
There's wooden walls upon our seas, 

And volunteers on shore, Sir. 



THE DUMFRIES VOLUNTEERS 157 

The Nith shall run to Corsincon, 

And C riff el sink to Sol way, 
Ere we permit a foreign foe 

On British ground to rally ! 

Fal de ral, &c. 

O let us not like snarling tykes 

In wrangling be divided ; 
Till, slap, come in an unco loon 

And wi' a rung decide it. 
Be Britain still to Britain true, 

Amang oursels united ; 
For never but by British hands 

Maun British wrangs be righted ! 
Fal de ral, &c. 

The kettle o' the kirk and state, 

Perhaps a clout may fail in't ; 
But deil a foreign tinkler loon 

Shall ever ca' a nail in't. 
Our fathers' bluid the kettle bought, 

And wha wad dare to spoil it ; 
By heaven, the sacrilegious dog 

Shall fuel be to boil it ! 

Fal de ral, &c. 






158 THE DUMFRIES VOLUNTEERS 

The wretch that wad a tyrant own, 

And the wretch his trne-born brother, 
Who would set the mob aboon the throne, 

May they be damn'd together ! 
Who will not sing, " G-od save the King/' 

Shall hang as high's the steeple ; 
But while we sing, " God save the King," 

We'll ne'er forget the People ! 



A MAN'S A MAN FOR A' THAT 

Is there, for honest poverty, 

That hangs his head, an' a' that ? 
The coward-slave, we pass him by, 
We dare be poor for a' that ; 
For a' that, an' a' that, 

Our toils obscure, an' a' that ; 
The rank is but the guinea stamp ; 
The man's the gowd for a' that. 

W T hat tho' on hamely fare we dine, 
Wear hodden-gray, an' a' that ; 

Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine, 
A man's a man for a' that. 



A MAN'S A MAN FOR A' THAT 159 

For a' that, an' a' that, 

Their tinsel show, an' a' that ; 

The honest man, tho' e'er sae poor, 
Is king o' men for a' that. 

Ye see yon birkie, ca'd a lord, 

Wha struts, an' stares, an' a' that ; 
Tho' hundreds worship at his word, 
He's but a coof for a' that : 
For a' that, an' a' that, 

His riband, star, an' a' that, 
The man o' independent mind, 
He looks and laughs at a' that. 

A prince can mak a belted knight, 

A marquis, duke, and a' that ; 
But an honest man's aboon his might, 
Guid faith he manna fa' that ! 
For a' that, an' a' that, 

Their dignities, an' a' that, 
The pith o' sense, an' pride o' worth, 
Are higher rank than a' that. 

Then let us pray that come it may, 
As come it will for a' that : 



160 A MAN'S A MAN FOE A' THAT 

That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth, 
May bear the gree, an' a' that. 
For a' that, an' a' that, 

It's coming yet, for a' that, 
That man to man, the war Id o'er, 
Shall brothers be for a' that. 



NOTES 



Page 1, line 3. Butler (Samuel, 1612-1680). Author of 
Hudibras (1663-1678), a mock-heroic poem satirizing Puri- 
tanism and popular in the court of Charles II. " It was, how- 
ever, the scandal of the age, that though the king was lavish in 
promises, he never did anything to relieve Butler's poverty. . . . 
He lived in poverty and obscurity for seventeen years after the 
first appearance of Hudibras. — Edmund Gosse, in Dictionary 
of National Biography. 

' ' My first favorite books had been Hudibras and Tristram 
Shandy." — Carlyle. Froude, Vol. I., p. 396. 

1. 7. The inventor of a spinning-jenny. Even he — James 
Hargreaves (17 -1778) — was driven from his home in Lanca- 
shire by a mob of spinners on the old-fashioned wheel, who 
feared they would be thrown out of employment by his inven- 
tion. 

1. 17. more than one splendid monument. For more infor- 
mation in regard to the monuments erected to the memory of 
Burns, see a well-illustrated article in the Art Journal, Vol. 49, 
p. 238. 

Page 2, line 4. the sixth narrative of his Life. The Life of 
Bobert Bums. By J. G. Lockhart, LL.B. Edinburgh, 1828. 
There were even more than five before. " The four principal 
biographers of our poet, Heron, Currie, Walker, and Irving," 

m 161 



162 NOTES [Page 2. 

etc. — Lockhart: Life of Burns, chap. viii. Cromek and 
Peterkin had also written narratives of the poet's life. See 
bibliography in Blackie's Life of Burns (Great Writers Series) 
and note to article on Burns in Diet, of Nat. Biog. 

1. 6. Lockhart (John Gibson, 1794-1854) is best known as the 
biographer of Sir Walter Scott, whose son-in-law he was. 

1. 23. Sir Thomas Lucy, according to a now discredited tra- 
dition, prosecuted Shakespeare for poaching in his deer park, 
which was near Charlecote Hall, three miles from Stratford. 

1. 24. John a Combe was a well-to-do and (according to tra- 
dition) usurious citizen of Stratford, from whom Shakespeare 
purchased many acres of land, and for whom, at his laughing 
request, Shakespeare is said to have proposed the following- 
epitaph : — 

" Ten-in-the-Hundred lies here ingrav'd ; 
Tis a hundred to ten his soul is not sav'd. 
If any man asks, ' Who lies in this tomb ? ' 
' Oh, ho! ' quoth the Devil, 'tis my John-a-Combe.' " 
— Cf. Halliwell-Phillipps' Outlines of Shakespeare's Life. 

Page 3, line 9. Honorable Excise Commissioners. The ex- 
cise is an inland duty levied on certain commodities of home 
produce, such as ale, spirits, tobacco, etc., or on their manufac- 
ture or sale. Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt. An associa- 
tion of Scotch noblemen and gentry. Burns dedicated to them 
the second edition of his poems (the first Edinburgh edition). 
The following excerpt from the minutes of a meeting of the asso- 
ciation, held at Edinburgh, January 10, 1787, may be of interest 
in this connection : "A motion being made by the Earl of Glen- 



Page 5.] NOTES 163 

cavin, and seconded by Sir John Whitefoord, in favor of Mr. 
Burns of Ayrshire, who had dedicated the new Edition of his 
Poems to the Caledonian Hunt. The meeting were of the opin- 
ion, that, in consideration of his superior merit as well as of the 
compliment paid to them, Mr. Hagart should be directed to sub- 
scribe for one hundred copies, in their name, for which he should 
pay to Mr. Burns, twenty-five pounds, upon the publication of his 
book.'" — Bibliography of Robert Burns. (James Gibson, edi- 
tor.) 

1. 1 1 . Ayr Writers. In Scotland the term " writer " is applied 
to law agents, attorneys, and sometimes to their principal clerks. 

1. 12. New and Old Light Clergy. Two factions into which 
the church of Scotland was split. The former, under the leader- 
ship of Blair and Robertson, were radical and progressive, the 
latter adhered to strict Calvinistic views. Burns sided with the 
New lights. Cf. p. 62 and p. 93. 

1. 28. Dr. Currie. Dr. James Currie (1756-1805), a Scotch 
physician, published in 1800, in behalf of the family of the poet, 
an edition of the poems, introduced by a Life of Burns. Mr. 
Walker. A life of Burns, by Josiah Walker, was prefixed to 
an edition of the poems in 1811, and separately printed. 

Page 5, line 10. Constable's Miscellany. It consisted of a 
series of original works, and of standard works republished in 
cheap form, and was the earliest attempt to popularize good 
literature. Lockhart's Life of Burns appeared in this form 
(dated 1828), — a duodecimo volume of 310 pages. The series 
was projected in 1825 by Archibald Constable (1774-1827), the 
famous Edinburgh publisher of Scott's novels. 

1. 21. Mr. Morris Birkbeck. His book was entitled, Notes 



164 NOTES [Page 5. 

on a Journey in America, from the Coast of Virginia to the 
Territory of Illinois, London, 1818. 

Page 9, line 1. Titan. The Titans were twelve children oi 
Uranus aiid Gaza (Heaven and Earth), and typified the law- 
less, brute forces of nature. In their wars with Zeus they 
piled mountains upon mountains in attempting to scale heaven. 

1. 11. Fergus[s]on (Robert, 1750-1774). One of his best 
poems was The Farmer's Ingle, from which Burns is said to have 
derived the idea of his Cotter'' s Saturday Night. Ramsay (Allan. 
1686-1758). " In some respects the best pastoral writer in the. 
world." — Leigh Hunt. For an interesting discussion of Burns' i- 
style, cf. R. L. Stevenson : Some Aspects of Bobert Burns it, 
Familiar Studies of Men and Books. The following sentences 
are quoted from the same : "To Ramsay and to Fergusson, then, 
he was indebted in a very uncommon degree, not only following 
their tradition and using their measures, but directly and 
avowedly imitating their pieces. . . . When we remembei 
Burns' s obligations to his predecessors, we must never forgei 
his immense advances on them. They had already ' discovered 
nature ; but Burns discovered poetry — a higher and more in- 
tense way of thinking of the things that go to make up nature, a 
higher and more ideal key of words in which to speak of them." 
Cf. also p. 70, line 6. 

Page 10, line 25. Sir Hudson Lowe (1769-1844). A British 
general who was governor of St. Helena during Napoleon's cap- 
tivity there (1815-1821). 

Page 11, linel. amid the melancholy main. Quoted from = 
stanza xxx. of the Castle of Indolence, by James Thomson 
(1700-1748). 






Page 24.] NOTES 165 

Page 12, line 12. The Daisy. Cf. To a Mountain Daisy. 

1. 14. wee, cowering, etc. Cf. To a Mouse. 

1. 15. thole. To endure, dribble. Drizzle, cranreuch. 
Hoar frost. 

1. 16. Winter. Cf. Winter : a Dirge. 

1. 20. it raises his thoughts, etc. Psalms civ. 3. Burns in a 
note to the poem, Winter : a Dirge, says: " It [winter] is my 
best season for devotion ; my mind is rapt up in a kind of 
enthusiasm to Him who, in the pompous language of Scripture, 
1 walks on the wings of the wind. ' In one of these seasons, just 
after a tract of misfortunes, I composed the following song." — 
Commonplace Book, April, 1784. 

Page 13, line 6. Arcadian illusion. Arcadia was a district in 
the heart of the Peloponnesus, shut in on all sides by mountains, 
where dwelt a simple, pastoral people, fond of music and danc- 
ing ; hence it has become a synonym for ideal rustic simplicity. 

Page 17, line 6. " Si vis me flere, dolendum est primum ipsi 
tibi; turn tua me infortunia laedent." — Horace : De Arte Po- 
etica. Liber II, 102, 103. If you wish me to weep, you must 
first feel grief yourself ; then your sorrows will touch me. 

Page 21, line 20. Letters to Mrs. Dunlop. Cf. " Robert 
Burns and Mrs. Dunlop. Correspondence now published in full 
for the first time with elucidations by William Wallace. " 2 vols. 
New York, 1898. Cf. also extract from letter on pp. 34-35. 

Page 22, line 12. Virgins of the Sun. Knights. . . . Sara- 
cens. . . . Chiefs, etc. Probably allusions to Moore's Lalla 
Bookh, Scott's Talisman and Ivanhoe, and Cooper's Leather- 
Stocking Tales. 

Page 24, line 13. vates. Soothsayer, prophet. 



166 NOTES [Page 24. 

1. 20. Minerva Press. A printing house in London, noted 
for the publication of trashy, sentimental novels. 

Page 25, line 25. Mossgiel. A farm near Mauchline, about 
118 acres in extent, on which Burns and his brother worked 
(1784-1786). and where he wrote many of his finest poems. 
Tarbolton. A parish in which William Burness, father of the 
poet, rented a farm during the last six years of his life (1777- 
1784). 

Page 26. line 2. Crockford's. A fashionable gambling resort 
in London. Tuileries. A famous palace in Paris, begun by 
Catherine de Medici in 1564, burned by the Commune in 1871. 

1. 5. it is hinted that he should have been born two centu- 
ries ago, etc. A probable allusion to the idea developed by 
Macaulay in his Essay on Milton {Edinburgh Review, August, 
1825), that " as civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily 
declines." 

Page 27, line 1. Theocritus (3d century b.c.) . A Greek poet ; 
a writer of pastoral poetry, of idyls — "little pictures of life." 

1. 3. Council of Trent. A council held at Trent (1545-1563), 
which condemned the leading doctrines of the Reformation 
concerning the Bible, original sin, and justification by faith. 

1. 4. Roman Jubilee. A solemn festival of the Catholic 
Church, usually held once in twenty-five years. The year 1900 
is a Jubilee Year. 

Page 28, line 22. Retzsch (Moritz, 1779-1857). A German 
etcher and painter, who illustrated the works of Goethe, 
Schiller, and Shakespeare. 

Page 29, line 4. Boreas. The north wind. fell. Keen. 
doure. Sullen, stubborn. 



Page B2.] XOTES 167 

1. 6. Phoebus. The sun. glowr. Stare. 

1. 7. lift. The sky. 

1. 12. burns. Brooks, wreeths. Drifts. 

1. 14. bock'd. Gushed. 

Page 30, line 7. thowes. Thaws. 

1. 8. snaw-broo. Snow-broth. 

1. 9. spate. A sweeping torrent after a rain or thaw. 

1. 14. gumlie jaups. Muddy jets. 

1. 15. Poussin (Nicholas, 1594-1665). A noted French 
historical and landscape painter. He painted a picture called 
"The Deluge,' 1 to which Carlyle may refer, but which Buskin 
in Modern Painters dismisses with a brief criticism as "un- 
characteristic." 

1. 22. Smithy of the Cyclops. Cf. Odyssey, IX. yoking of 
Priam's Chariot. Cf. Iliad, XXIV. 

1. 23. Burn-the-wind. Blacksmith. 

Note. Fabulosus Hydaspes ! From the familiar Ode of 
Horace beginning ,k Integer vitse " (Lib. I., Car. XXII.). The 
Hydaspes is a tributary of the Indus ; on its banks Alexander 
defeated Porus (b.c. 327). It was called fabulosus, because it 
was in the far East, about which unexplored region numberless 
stories were afloat in Rome. 

Page 31, line 23. Defoe (Daniel, 1661-1731). Best known 
to-day as the author of Robinson Crusoe. Richardson (Samuel, 
1689-1761). Called the founder of the English domestic novel. 

Page 32, line 10. red-wat-shod. Wat means wet. The 
whole expression — wading in blood. 

1. 17. Professor Stewart (Dugald, 1753-1828). A famous 
Scottish philosopher who held the chair of moral philosophy in 



168 NOTES [Page 32. 

the University of Edinburgh. During the early years of his 
professorship he spent his summers at Catrine, on the water of 
Ayr, not far from Mossgiel ; and there formed a friendship with 
the poet. Cf. note on p. 25, line 25. The passage quoted by 
Carlyle is to be found in Stewart's Works, edited by Sir William 
Hamilton. Edinburgh: 1858, Vol. X., p. cxl. 

Page 33, line 2. Keats (John, 1796-1821). An English poet 
whose Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, and Eve of 
St. Agnes one should read before assenting to Carlyle's harsh 
criticism. For a fairer criticism see Matthew Arnold's Essay 
on John Keats. 

1. 18. Novum Organum. The title of Lord Bacon's greatest 
philosophical work, which was completed in 1620. The words 
mean "new instrument." 

Page 34, line 19. doctrine of association — of ideas. 

1. 22. We know nothing, etc. From a letter addressed to 
Mrs. Dunlop, dated Ellisland, New-year-day Morning, 1789. 
Cf. note on p. 21, line 20. 

Page 37, line 6. ourie. Shivering, drooping. 

1. 7. brattle. Fury. 

1. 9. deep-lairing. Deep-wading, sprattle. Scramble. 

1. 10. scar. Cliff. A steep, bare, rocky place on the side 
of a hill. 

1. 11. Ilk. Every. 

1. 15. chittering. Trembling with cold. 

Page 38, line 1. aiblins. Perhaps. 

1. 5. Dr. Slop and uncle Toby. Characters in Laurence 
Sterne's Tristram Shandy, — a favorite book of Carlyle's. 

1. 11. Indignation makes verses. Cf. "Si natura negat, 



Page 41.] NOTES 169 

fecit indignatioversum." — Juvenal (Junius, a Roman satirist, 
38-120), Sat. i. 79. If nature denies the ability, "indignation 
makes verses.'" 

Page 39, line 1. Johnson (Samuel, 1709-1784). A biogra- 
pher, essayist, critic, versifier, and lexicographer. He is re- 
ported to have said, " Dear Bathurst was a man to my heart's 
content : he hated a fool, and he hated a rogue, and he hated 
a Whig; he was a very good hater." — Boswell : Life of 
Johnson. 

1. 13. Furies of iEschylus. iEschylus (525-426) is ac- 
counted the greatest of Greek tragic poets. The allusion is to 
his tragedy called The Eumenides, in which the Furies compose 
the chorus. 

Page 40, line 17. Cacus. A giant and son of Vulcan, who, 
according to Roman mythology, lived near the spot where Rome 
was built. He stole from Hercules some of the cattle that had 
belonged to Geryon, dragging them backward into his cave 
under the Aventine, so that their tracks appeared to lead out- 
ward. But Hercules found them by their lowing and choked 
to death the thief, incendia vana vomentem. For the particu- 
lars of the story see iEneid, Book VIII. , lines 190-267. 

1. 18. sturt. Struggle. 

1. 19. Nimrods. 'Nimrod was a mighty hunter. Gen. x. 
8, 9. I Chron. i. 10. 

Page 41, line 4. Thebes. The chief city of Bceotia. The 
fortunes and misfortunes of CEdipus, king of Thebes, and his 
race, furnished many themes for the tragic poets. Pelops' line. 
This line included Atreus, Agamemnon, Orestes, and Ephige- 
nia. Cf. Milton's lines in II Penseroso : — 



170 NOTES [Page 41. 

" Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy 
In sept red pall come sweeping by, 
Presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line, 
Or the tale of Troy divine." 

Page 43. line 9. he is not the Tieck but the Musaus of this 
tale. Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) and Johann Karl August 
Musaus (1735-1787) were German authors ; the former was a 
poet and critic ; the latter was noted chiefly for his Folk-Tales 
of the Germans. About three years before writing the Essay 
on Burns, Caiiyle was engaged in translating representative 
works of both (cf. Introduction, p. xxii.). The translations, 
together with an essay on each by C.arlyle, constitute Vol. I. of 
the German Romances, from which the following passages are 
quoted, in order that those who are not " our German readers " 
may feel in some degree the force of the distinction between the 
two authors : " A very slight power of observation will su 
flee to convince us that Tieck is no ordinary man ; but a try 
Poet, a Poet horn as well as made. ... He is no mere observt 
and compiler ; rendering back to us, with additions or subtra 
tions, the Beauty which existing things have of themselves pr. 
senteel to him ; but a true Maker, to whom the actual ai 
external is but the excitement for ideal creations, representir 
and ennobling its effects." Of Musaus; "His style sparkles 
with metaphors, sometimes just and beautiful, often new a;. 1 
surprising ; but it is laborious, unnatural, and diffuse. . i . 
Musaus is. in fact, no poet ; he can see, and describe with rir , 
graces what he sees ; but he is nothing, or very little, o:. a 
Maker. His imagination is not powerless : it is like a bird of 
feeble wing, which can fly from tree to tree : but never soars 



Page 49.] NOTES 171 

for a moment into the aether of Poetry, to bathe in its serene 
splendor, with the region of the Actual lying far below, and 
brightened into beauty by radiance not its own." 

Page 44, line 16. raucle carlin. Fearless old crone, wee 
Apollo. ' ' A pigmy scraper with his fiddle. ' ' 
1. 17. Son of Mars. A soldier. 

1. 19. Poosie-Nansie. The name of the keeper of the ale- 
house. 

Page 45, line 2. Caird. A travelling tinker. 
1. 4. brats and callets. Loose women. 

1. 12. Teniers (David, 1610-1690). A noted Flemish genre, 
landscape, and portrait painter. 

1. 17. Beggars' Opera. A satirical opera by John Gay 
(1728). Cf. Century Cyclopaedia of Names. 
I 1. 18. Beggars' Bush. A comedy by Fletcher and others, 
.erformed at court in 1622. Cf. Century Cyclopaedia of 
fames. 
■ Page 46, line 17. Ossorius the Portugal Bishop (Osorio, 
Feronymo, 1506-1580). Called the Cicero of Portugal. 
- 1 Page 48, line 19. Fletcher (Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, 
J653-1716). A Scottish writer whose chief claim to lasting 
%me appears to hang upon the following remark, which was 
made in a letter to the Marquis of Montrose : " I knew a very 
"tfise man that believed that if a man were permitted to make 
all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a 
- nation." 

tPage 49, line 25. Our Grays and Glovers. Thomas Gray 

■ (1716-1771) is best known as the writer of The Elegy in <i 

Country Churchyard. For a fairer estimate of his work, see 



172 NOTES [Page 49. 

Matthew Arnold's Essay on Thomas Gray. Richard Glover 
(1712-1785). Cf. Gosse, Eighteenth Century Literature. 

Page 50, line 4. Goldsmith (Oliver, 1728-1774). Compare 
his verses with those of Pope, for example, or his Vicar of 
Wakefield with Johnson's Basselas, to find out why he was an 
" exception." 

1. 5. Johnson. Cf. note on p. 39, line 1. The Rambler was 
a semi-weekly, issued 1750-1752 and following in the track of 
Addison's and Steele's Spectator. The Latinized style of the 
essays in the Rambler is noted for its studied avoidance of com- 
mon English words. Rasselas (1759) is a romance, the scene 
of which is laid in the Orient. 

1. 16. Boston (Thomas, 1676-1732). A noted Scotch Pres- 
byterian divine. He wrote Human Nature in its Fourfold State 
in 1720. 

1. 24. Lord Karnes (Henry Home, 1696-1782). A Scottish 
judge and philosophical writer ; author of Elements of Criticism. 

Page 51, line 1. Hume (David, 1711-1776). A Scottish 
philosopher and historian. See the last two paragraphs of 
Carlyle's Essay on BosweWs Johnson for an interesting com- 
parison between Hume and Johnson. Robertson (William, 
1721-1793). A Scottish historian and clergyman. Smith 
(Adam, 1723-1790). A celebrated Scottish political economist, 
— one of the founders of the science. His chief work is An In- 
quiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). 

1. 11. Racine (Jean Baptiste, 1639-1699). A French tragic 
poet. Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet de, 1694-1778). A 
French poet, essayist, and critic. Batteux (Charles, 1713- 
1780). A French critic, chiefly noted as a writer on esthetics. 



Page 55.] NOTES 17.3 

Boileau-Despreaux (Nicholas, 1636-1711). A French critic, 
satirist, and poet. 

1. 13. Montesquieu (Baron de la Brede et de, Charles de 
Secondat, 1689-1755). A French philosopher. Mably (Gabriel 
Bonnot, Abbe de, 1709-1785). A French publicist. 

1. 15. Quesnay (Fran§ois, 1694-1774). A French political 
economist ; founder of the school of physiocrats. Adam Smith's 
indebtedness to Quesnay is denied by John Kae in his Life of 
Adam Smith, p. 215. London, 1895. 

1. 19. La Fleche. A town in the department of Sarthe, 
France, on the Loire, where Hume spent three years. He 
describes himself as wandering about there " in solitude, dream- 
ing the dream of his philosophy " ; and there he composed his 
; first work, the Treatise of Human Nature. 

Page 54, line 3. A wish, etc. From his epistle To the 
fi aid wife of Wauchope House. 

1. 10. bear. Barley. > 

Page 55, 1. 22. he never attains to any clearness regarding 
himself, etc. Yet in his autobiographical letter to Dr. Moore 
(which is quoted in Currie's Life) he wrote : " It was ever my 
opinion that the great, unhappy mistakes and blunders, both 
in a rational and religious point of view, of which we see 
thousands daily guilty, are owing to their ignorance or mistaken 
notions of themselves. To know myself, had been all along my 
constant study. I weighed myself, alone ; I balanced myself 
with others ; I watched every means of information, how much 
ground I occupied as a man and as a poet ; I studied assidu- 
ously Nature's design, where she seemed to have intended the 
various lights and shades in my character." 



174 NOTES [Page 55. 

1. 23. he never ascertains his peculiar aim. In the same 
autobiographical letter, from which a quotation was made 
above, are the following sentences: "The great misfortune of 
my life was never to have an aim. I had felt early some stir- 
rings of ambition, but they were the blind gropings of Homer's 
Cyclops round the walls of his cave. I saw my father's situa- 
tion entailed on me perpetual labor. The only two doors by 
which I could enter the fields of fortune were — the most 
niggardly economy or the little chicaning art of bargain-making. 
The first is so contracted an aperture, I never could squeeze 
myself into it ; the last — I always hated the contamination of 
its threshold ! " Are any of the statements made by Carlyle 
and Burns in regard to the self-knowledge and lack of aim of 
the latter inconsistent ? 

Page 59, line 19. priest-like father. Cf. r flie Cotter's Satur- 
day Night. 

Page 60, line 15. in glory and in joy, etc. From Words- 
worth's Leech Gatherer, stanza vii.; quoted also by Lockhart 
on the title-page of the Life of Burns. 

Page 63, line 11. passions raging like demons, etc. "My 
passions, when once they were lighted up, raged like so many 
devils till they got vent in rhyme ; and then conning over my 
verses, like a spell, soothed all into quiet!" Written with 
reference to about the time of his twenty -third year. — Auto- 
biographical letter to Dr. Moore. 

Page 64, line 3. hungry Ruin has him in the wind. Quoted 
by Burns as a reason for engaging a passage in the first ship 
that was to sail for Jamaica. — Autobiographical letter to Dr. 
Moore. 



Page 68.] NOTES 17 O 

1. 7. the gloomy night is gathering fast, etc. The first line 
of the poem entitled Farewell to Ayr, of which Carlyle quotes 
the last four lines, substituting "Adieu, my native banks of 
Ayr," for " Farewell, the bonnie banks of Ayr." 

" I had for some time been skulking from covert to covert, 
under all the terrors of a jail ; as some ill-advised, ungrateful 
people had uncoupled the merciless legal pack at my heels. I 
had taken the last farewell of my few friends ; my chest was on 
the road to Greenock ; I had composed a song, ' The gloomy 
night is gathering fast,' which was to be the last effort of my 
muse in Caledonia, when a letter from Dr. Blacklock to a friend 
of mine overthrew all my schemes, by rousing my poetic ambi- 
tion. His idea, that I would meet with every encouragement 
for a second edition, fired me so much that away I posted for 
Edinburgh without a single acquaintance in town, or a single 
letter of recommendation in my pocket." — Autobiographical 
letter to Dr. Moore. 

Page 65, line 3. Rienzi (Nicolo Gabrini, 1313-1354) headed 
a revolt against the oligarchs of Rome and sought to reestablish 
the Republic. His head was turned by sudden success. Re- 
sorting to violence to raise funds, he lost his popularity, and 
was put to death by a mob. 

Page 67, line 5. Virgilium vidi tantum. Ovid : Tristia IV. 
10, line 51. I have at least seen Virgil. 

Page 68, line 13. Langhorne (John, 1735-1779). An Eng- 
lish clergyman and poet. For some of his poems see Chambers' 
Cyclopaedia of English Literature. In quoting, Scott appears 
to have substituted " mother wept " for " parent mourned." 

1. 23. Nasmyth's picture. See frontispiece. 



176 NOTES [Page 70. 

Page 70, line 12. in malam partem. Disparagingly. 

Page 76, line 2. Maecenases. Maecenas was a wealthy Roman 
of the equestrian order, who was a friend and patron of Horace 
and Virgil. His name has become a synonym for a liberal pat- 
ron of letters. 

Page 78, line 14. Jacobin. Literally, a member of the club 
of radical political agitators who took their name from the Jac- 
obin Convent in which they held their secret meetings during 
the French Revolution. 

Page 79, line 25. corn-bing. Heap of grain. 

Page 80, line 3. linking. Walking smartly. 

Page 82, line 1. as a volunteer. Cf. Burns's poem, The 
Dumfries Volunteers. 

Page 85, line 24. Patronage . . . twice cursed, etc. Cf. 
Merchant of Venice, IV. i. 177. 

Page 87, line 23. fardels of a weary life, etc. Fardels — 
burdens. Cf. the famous soliloquy, Hamlet, III. i., in which 
are to be found the words, 

" who would fardels bear, 
To grunt and sweat under a weary life," etc. 

Page 88, line 13. Roger Bacon (1219-1294). An English 
Franciscan monk and philosopher, who was imprisoned because 
of his heretical writings. Galileo (1564-1642). A famous Italian 
astronomer, whose doctrines were condemned by the Pope, and 
who was forced by the Inquisition to abjure the Copernican 
theory. 

1. 14. Tasso (Torquato, 1544-1595). An Italian poet. 



Page 100.] NOTES 177 

1. 15. Camoens (Luiz de, 1524-1580). The greatest Portu- 
guese poet. 

Page 91, line 18. Locke (John, 1632-1704). An English phi- 
losopher and political writer. 

Page 92, line 2. Araucana. Written by Alonso de Ercilla 
y Zuhiga (1533-1595), a Spanish soldier and poet. The epic is 
based upon his experiences as a soldier : he took an active part 
in a campaign against the Araucanos, an Indian tribe in South 
America. 

Page 93, line 23. Rabelais (Francois, 1495-1553). A bril- 
liant, but sceptical French satirist. 

Page 95, line 5. Jean Paul, Johann Paul Friedrich Richter 
(1763-1825), a German poet and philosopher, introduced to the 
English public by Carlyle's Essay on Richter (1827). 

Page 96, line 17. Byron. For further light on the point 
under discussion, cf. Morley's Essay on Carlyle — "Mr. Car- 
lyle's victory over Byronism," and Matthew Arnold's Essay on 
Byron. 

Page 98, line 18. words of Milton, etc. " And long it was 
not after, when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he who 
would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in 
laudable things ought himself to be a true poem ; that is, a com- 
position and pattern of the best and honorablest things ; not 
presuming to sing high praises of heroic men, or famous cities, 
unless he have in himself the experience and the practice of all 
that which is praiseworthy." — Milton : An Apology for Smec- 
tymnuus (1642). 

Page 100, line 6. Plebiscita. Laws enacted by the common 
people. 

N 



178 NOTES [Page 101. 

Page 101, line 6. Ramsgate. A popular seaside resort in 
Kent, about sixty miles east of London. 

1. 7. Isle of Dogs. A peninsula of the Thames, three and a 
half miles east of St. Paul's, London, where the king's hounds 
were once kept. 

1. 17. Valclusa Fountain. The fountain is associated with 
the poet Petrarch, who made his home in Valcluse, a village 
about ten miles east of Avignon. 



INDEX TO NOTES 



.Eschylus, 169. 
Araucana, 177. 
Arcadia, 165. 
Ayr Writers, 163. 

Bacon, 176. 
Batteaux, 172. 
Birkbeck, 163. 
Boileau, 173. 
Butler, 161. 
Byron, 177. 

Cacus, 169. 

Caledonian Hunt, 162. 

Camoens, 176. 

Constable's Miscellany, 163. 

Council of Trent, 166. 

">ockford's, 166. 

Jiirrie, 163. 

3foe, 167. 

mlop, Letters to Mrs., 165. 

rise Commissioners, 162. 

)ulosus Hydaspes, 167. 
gusson, 164. 



Fletcher, 177. 

Galileo, 176. 
Glover, 171. 
Goldsmith, 172. 
Gray, 171. 

Horace, 165. 
Hume, 172. 

Isle of Dogs, 178. 

Jacobin, 176. 
Johnson, 169 and 172. 

Kames, Lord, 172. 
Keats, 168. 

La Fleche, 173. 
Langhorne, 175. 
Locke, 177. 
Lockhart, 162. 
Lowe, 164. 
Lucy, 162. 

Mably, 173. 
Maecenas, 176. 
179 



180 



INDEX TO NOTES 



Milton, 177. 
Minerva Press, 166. 
Montesquieu, 173. 
Monuments to Burns, 161. 
Mossgiel, 166. 
Musiius, 170. 

New and Old Light Clergy, 163. 

Nimrod, 169. 

Novum Organum, 168. . 

Ossorius, 171. 

Pelops' line, 169. 
Plebiscita, 177. 

Quesnay, 173. 

Rabelais, 177. 
Racine, 172. 
Ramsay, 164. 
Ramsgate, 177. 
Retzsch, 166. 
Richardson, 167. 



Richter, 177. 
Rienzi, 175. 
Robertson, 172. 
Roman Jubilee, 166. 

Si vis me flere, 165. 
Smith, 172. 
Stewart, 167. 
Style of Burns, 164. 

Tarbolton, 166. 
Tasso, 176. 
Teniers, 171. 
Thebes, 169. 
Theocritus, 166. 
Tieck, 170. 
Titan, 164. 
Tuileries, 166. 

Valclusa Fountain, 178. 
Voltaire, 172. 

Walker, 163. 



GLOSSARY 



A', all. 

Abeigh, at a shy distance. 

Aboon, above. 

Acqueut, acquainted. 

Ae, one. 

Aften, often. 

A-gley, off the right line. 

Aiblins, perhaps. 

Ain, own. 

Airt, direction, the point from 

which the wind blows. 
Amaist, almost. 
Amaug, among. 
A nee, once. 
Ane, one. 
Asklent, aslant. 
Aught, eight. 
Auld, old. 

Baggie (dim. of bag), the stom- 
ach. 
Bairns, children. 
Bairntirae, a family of children. 
Baitb, both. 
Bardie, dim. of bard. 
Bear, barley. 
Beet, to add fuel to afire. 



Beld, bald. 

Belyve, by and by. 

Ben, through, into the spence or 
parlor. 

Bid, a habitation. 

Bield, shelter. 

Big, to build. 

Bing, heap of corn, potatoes, etc. 

Birk, the birch. 

Birkie, a spirited fellow. 

Blate, shamefaced. 

Blaw, to blow. 

Bleer't, bleared. 

Blin', blind. 

Bluid, blood. 

Bocked, vomited. 

Bonie, beautiful. 

Brae, the slope of a hill. 

Braid, broad. 

Braing't, reeled forward. 

Brattle, a short race ; hurry ; 
fury. 

Braw, handsome. 

Breastit, did spring up or for- 
ward. 

Brent, straight, smooth, un- 
wrinTcled. 
181 



182 



GLOSSARY 



Brig, bridge. 

Brooses, races at country wed- 
dings, who shall first reach the 
bridegroom's house on return- 
ing from church. 

Buirdly, strong, imposing look- 
ing, iv ell-knit. 

Bure, bore, did bear. 

Burn, stream. 

Burnewin, i.e. burn the wind, a 
blacksmith. 

Ca', to drive. 

Ca'd, named. 

Caird, tinker. 

Canna, cannot. 

Cannie, careful. 

Cantie, in high spirits, merry. 

Cape-stane, cope-stone. 

Carlin, an old woman. 

Cauld, cold. 

Glittering, trembling with cold. 

Claes, clothes. 

Clips, shears. 

Clout, a patch. 

Cog, a wooden dish. 

Coila, from Kyle, a district of 
Ayrshire, so called, saith tra- 
dition, from Coil, or Coila, a 
Pictish monarch. 

Coot, fool. 

Coost, did cast. 

Corn' t, fed with oats. 

Crack, converse, gossip. 

Cranreuch, hoar frost. 



I Craw, to crow. 
Croon, a hollow and continued 

moan. 
Crouse, gleeful. 

Daimen-icker. an ear of corn 

now and then. 
Daur't, dared. 
Daurk, a day's labor. 
Deil, devil. 
Dine, dinner-time. 
Donsie, unlucky. 
Doure, stubborn. 
Dow, do, ca». 
Dowie, low-spirited. 
Dribble, drizzle. 
Driegh, tedious. 
Droop-rumpl't. that droops at the 

crupper. 
Drumly, muddy. 

Ee, eye. 
I Een, eyes. 
Eydent, diligent. 

Fairin, a present, a reward. 

Fa use, false. 

¥e\\,keen, biting; nippy, tasty. 

Fetch't, pulled intermittently. 

Fidge, to fidget. 

Fier, brother, friend. 

Fittie-lan, the near horse of the 

hindmost pair in the plough. 
Fleech'd, supplicated. 
Fleesh, a fleece. 



GLOSSARY 



183 



Flichterin' , fluttering. 

Fliskit, fretted. 

Flit, remove. 

Foggage, a second growth of 

grass, aftergrass. 
Forbye, besides. 
Fou, full, tipsy; a bushel. 
Frae, from. 

Gae, go. 

Gar, to make. 

Gat, got. 

Gaun, going. 

Gear, wealth, goods. 

Gie, .give. 

Glaizie, glittering, smooth, like 

glass. 
Glowr, stare. 
Gowau, the daisy. 
Gowd, gold. 
Grat, wept. 
Gree, a prize. 
Guid, good. 
Guid-willie, ivith hearty good 

will. 
Gumlie, muddy, discolored. 

Ha' Bible, hall-Bible. 
Hae, have. 
Haffets, the temples. 
Hafflins, partly. 
Haiu'd, spared, saved. 
Hald, an abiding -place. 
Hallaa, a particular partition 
wall in a cottage. 



Ha me. /mine. 
I Hamely, homely. 
i Hansel, a gift for a particular 
season, or the first money on 
any particular occasion. 

Hastit, hasted. 

Hawkie, cow. 

Heapit, heaped. 

Histie, dry, barren. 

Hizzie, hussy. 

Hoble, to hobble. 

Hodden-gray, woollen cloth of a 
coarse quality, made by min- 
gling one black fleece with a 
dozen white ones. 

Hotcli'd, fidgeted. 

Howe, a hollow or dell. 

Howe-backit, sunk in the back. 

Hoyte, to amble crazily. 

Ilk, every. 

Ingle, the household fire. 

Jauk, to dally, to trifle. 
Jaups, splashes. 

Jinker, that turns quickly, a 
dodger. 

Kebbuck, a cheese. 

Ken, knoio. 

Ket, a hairy, matted fleece. 

Knaggie, like knags, or points of 

rock. 
Knowe, a hillock, a knoll. 
Kye, cows. 



184 



GLOSSARY 



Lairing, wading and sinking in 

snow or mud. 
Laith, loth. 
Laithfu', bashful. 
Lane, alone. 
Lanely, lonely. 
Lap, did leap. 
Lave, the rest. 
Laverock, the lark. 
Lift, sky. 
Linkin, tripping. 
Linn, a waterfall. 
Lint, flax. Sin lint was i' the 

bell, since flax was in flower. 
Lowping, leaping. 
Lyart, gray. 

Maun, must. 

Mavis, the thrush. 

Meere, a mare. 

Melder, com or grain of any 

/ jid sent to the mill to be 

§r d. 
Mei. t ^od manners. 
Minnie, mother. 
Mony, many. 
Muckle, great, big. 

Na\ not. 

Naething, nothing. 
Neibor, neighbor. 

Ony, any. 

Or, is often used for ere, before, 
p. 123. 



Ourie, shivering. 
Owre, over. 

Paidl't, paddled. 

Parritch, oatmeal boiled in water, 

stirabout. 
Pattle, a small spade to clean the 

plough. 
Pleugh, plough. 
Pow, the head, the skull. 
Pu', to pull. 

Rair, to roar. Wad rair't, would 
have roared. 

Rape, a rope. 

Ra ucl e , fe a rless . 

Rax, to stretch. 

Reestit, stood restive. 

Remead, remedy. 

Rig, a ridge. 

Rin, run. 

Ripp, a handful of unthrashed 
com. 

Riskit, made a noise like the tear- 
ing of roots. 

Rowe, roll. 

Rung, cudgel. 

Sae, so. 
Sair, sore. 
Saugh, the willow. 
Saumont-coble, salmon fishing- 
boat. 
Saut, salt. 



GLOSSARY 



185 



Sax, six. 

Scai-, a precipitous bank of rock 
or earth. 

Shaw, show. 

Sic, such. 

Simmer, summer. 

Skeigh, high-mettled, proud, 
saucy. 

Skriegh, to scream. 

Slee, shy. 

Sleekit, slesk. 

Slypet, slipped. 

Smoor'd, smothered. 

Snaw broo, melted snow. 

Snell, bitter, biting. 

Snoov't, vient smoothly. 

Sonsie, jolly, comely. 

Sowpe, a small quantity of any- 
thing liquid. 

Spate, a sioeeping torrent after a 
rain or thaw. 

Spean, to wean. 

Spence, the count?']/ parlor. 

Spier, to ask, to inquire. 

Sprat tie, to struggle. 

Spritty, full of speets — tough- 
rooted plants something like 
rushes. 

Stacher, stagger, walk un- 
steadily. 

Staggie, dim. of stag. 

Stane, stone. 

Stank, a pool or pond. 

Stark, strong. 

Staw, did steal. 



Steeve, € /7>ra, compacted. 

Sten't, reared. 

Steyest, steepest. 

Stibble, stubble. 

Stimpart, an eighth part of a 

Winchester bushel. 
Stoure, dust. 
Start, struggle. 
Sugh, a rushing sound. 
Swank, stately. 
Swats, ale. 
Syne, since, then. 



Tawie, that allows itself peace- 
ably to be handled. 

Tawted, malted, uncombed. 

Tentie, heedful. 

Thegither, together. 

Thole, to suffer, to endure. 

Thowes, thaws. 

Thrave, twenty-four sheavA of 
corn, including two shocks. 

Timmer, timber. 

Tint, lost. 

Tips, rams. 

Tocher, marriage portion. 

Towmond, a twelvemonth. 

Toyte, to totter. 

Trickie, tricksy. 

Tyke, a vagrant dog. 

Unco, very. 

Uncos, strange things, news of 
the country-side. 



186 



GLOSSARY 



Wa', a wall. 
Wad, would. 
Wanchancie, unlucky. 
Warld, world. 
Warst, worst. 
Wat, wot, know. 
Wattle, a wand. 
Waught, a copious drink. 
Waur, to fight, to defeat. 
Weel, well. 
Weet, wet, dew. 



Wha, who. 

Whaizle, to wheeze. 

Wham. whom. 

Willie-waught, a hearty draught. 

Win', wind. 

Wintle, to stagger, to reel. 

Wreeths, drifts. 

Yird, the earth. 
Yont, b yond. 
Yowe, ewe. 



COLLEGE ENTRANCE REQUIREMENTS 

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REQUIRED FOR CAREFUL STUDY. 

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Milton's Paradise Lost, Books I. 

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Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 

Cooper's The Last of the Mohi- 
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and XXIV 1900 1901 1902 

Scott's Ivanhoe 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 

hakespeare's The Merchant of 
Venice 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar . . 1903 1904 1905 

1 ennyson's The Princess . . . 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 



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An Introduction to the Study of Literature 

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